Swedenborg's Doctrine of correspondence, a key to the intercourse between the soul and body

SwEDENBORG'S

Doctrine of Correspondence

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS,

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Shelf

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

4

SWEDENBORG'S

DOCTRINE of CORRESPONDENCE

A KEY TO THE INTERCOURSE BETWEEN
THE SOUL AND BODY

Chicago
Western New-Church Union
1SS9

THE LIBRAJLT

OF CONGRESS

WASHINGTON

\

COPYEIGHT, I889

L. P. MERCER

CONTENTS.

PAGE.

The Science of Correspondence 5

' Who was Swedenborg ? 8

The Second Coming of the Lord 16

The History of Opinion 23

Seership 28

The General Doctrine..,. 33

Discrete Degrees 34

The Two Worlds 38

The Two Bodies 48

Mental Phenomena 58

Sources of Influx 66

Correspondence and Influx . 72

The Written Word 104

The Incarnate Word 10S

The Laws of Providence 112

"Thoughts About Christian Science" Ex-
amined , 116

THE SCIENCE OF COEEESPONDENCE.

This essay is in fulfilment of the author's
promise to set forth the doctrine of Swed-
enborg in some of its bearings on " Christian
Science" and Metaphysical healing. It is
hoped also that it may incite to further and
fuller study of a subject that is exhaustless,
and which in the otherwise abundant litera-
ture of the New Church has not so far received
proportionate treatment. Above all, the writ-
er indulges a hope that it may prove to
those who are interested in these high themes,
and who have had their eyes turned expect-
antly to the writings of Swedenborg, some-
thing of a guide and guard against error.

We are living in the days of the Second
Coming of the Lord, in which a new thing
has happened in the world. A rational revel-
ation concerning God and man and the spirit-
ual world has been given by means of a man
prepared to receive it and publish it ; and the
Divine truths involved aforetime in the "Word
of God are now evolved by means of the prin-
ciples and doctrines- so revealed. It is a prin-

5

6 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

ciple as universal as the antagonism of good
and evil, that when the Lord comes to do
good, the evil are busy to do mischief, and
when He reveals new truths, Satanic spirits
are active to instill falsities. " Hell hath en-
larged herself to meet thee at thy coming," is
the inevitable effect of the inauguration of a
• new Divine Dispensation. We are living in
such a time when good and evil are contend-
ing on new terms for the mastery of human
minds. The Lord has revealed rational
truths in great fulness for the establishment
of a New Church and a new religion among
men. The antecedent effect of the revelation
in the spiritual world, is felt in a new free-
dom of willing and thinking, and an impulse
to work out the old problems on new lines.
Meanwhile the new truths are abroad in the
world. They press upon all minds, reinforced
by a new influx from -heaven favorable to
freedom and reason. They appeal to reason.
They open causes in the spiritual world and
in human minds, and impel men to inquire, to
know, and to understand. But they are divine
from the Lord, and they have but one end, that
is to lead men to the Lord and to a higher spir-
itual life. In the nature of things, this new
freedom of willing and thinking lets loose

THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE. 7

tie opposing evil and the false. The new
truths are met by falsities which are agree-
able to man's selfish and sensual life, which
masquerade as truths, and blind reason by
sophistries, and seek to defeat the Lord's
ends, by feeding man's vanity and self-suffi-
ciency in the name of spiritual Christianity.
It is thus that we find the most transcendent
truths in company with mere insanities and
falsities, and minds apparently impelled by
the best of motives involved in most destruc-
tive errors. This is unavoidable in such a
time of transition and judgment. The only
remedy is instruction in genuine truths. The
fountain of the needed truths is the revela-
tion which the Lord has made for His New
Church in the writings of Emanuel Sweden
bor^.

It has come to pass as Dr. Wilkinson pre-
dicted forty years ago, " that while an un-
believing century could see nothing in Swed-
enborg, its sucessor more truthful and trust-
ful sees more and more ; and strong indications
exist," he said, "that in another five-and-twen-
ty years the field occupied by this author
must be visited by the leaders of opinion
en masse, and whether they will or no; be-
cause it is not proselytism that will take

8 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

them there, but the expansion and culmina-
tion of the truth and the organic course of
events." Accordingly we find his name to-day
in all the literature of "new things" and his
writings are often quoted; but his teachings
get sadly perverted in the process ; and his
name is used as authority for opinions that
otherwise want a character. Nothing but the
study of his works, on the line of his unvary-
ing claim for them, that they contain " doc-
trines received from the Lord alone while
reading the "Word " can have any weight in
deciding upon their contents.

"WHO WAS SWEDENBORG ?

Swedenborg was the son of a Lutheran
Bishop, a scholar, a practical engineer, en-
trusted with high official position, a man of
science, a philosopher, a theologian and a
seer who lived between 1688 and 1772.
This life of fourscore years' untiring energy
divides itself, upon superficial observation,
into two periods. The first fifty years of it
were devoted to the pursuit of natural learn-
ing and independent investigations in science
and philosophy. In early life his mind was
carefully and severely cultivated, and he de-
veloped a vigorous and acute intellect, with
a capacity for the most profound and sustain-

WHO WAS SWEDENBORG?

9

ed thought. He was, during this entire per-
iod, the precise type of man which this gen-
eration delights to honor; strong, keen, self-
reliant, practical. Endowed with a hardy
constitution, he had a calm, placid disposition,
led an active, laborious, cheerful life, travel-
ing continually and keeping himself posted
in the developments of scientific research and
practical improvement; composed his works
and conducted his literary business unaided;
enjoyed the friendship and confidence of his
king and fellow-statesmen ; held a govern-
ment position at the head of the College of
mines, and developed the mineral wealth of
Sweden; discussed politics in the Senate; mem-
orialized the government on finance and
other weighty matters; while he was elabor-
ating in private and publishing from time to
time the results of the most sublime and ex-
tensive philosophical attempts upon which
any single man ever ventured. Here, I say,
was the type of man which our age believes
in. Learned, standing far ahead of his gen-
eration; exact, trained in mathematical ac-
curacy and schooled to observation; practical,
seeing at once some useful application of
every new discovery; a man of affairs, able
to take care of his own, and bear his part in

10 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

the nation's councils ; aspiring, ignoring no
useful application, but content with no
achievement short of a final philosophy of
causes; inductive, taking nothing for granted
but facts of experiment, and seeking to as-
cend therefrom to a generalization which shall
explain them, — this is the sort of man which
in our day we consider sound and useful and
grand. Such was Swedenborg, the assessor.
A more penetrating, untiring, laborious, and
practical man of science never lived.

He possessed a quality of analysis so search-
ing and discriminative as to be altogether
microscopic in its character and application,
united with a most wonderful power
of generalization. By these faculties of
his mind he was enabled to combine the
strength of both the old and new philosophy,
and by a clear analytic and synthetic com-
parison of every whole with its parts, and of
the parts with the whole, he did what had
never been done before, and opened science
to the light of reason, and to its true position
as a servant of rational philosophy. His meth-
od not only enabled him to anticipate con-
clusions which experimental science has been
tardy enough in reaching, but it brought him
face to face with the problems which in our

WHO WAS SWEDENBORG? 11

day have opened to the thought of all, and
to many with such appalling suggestion —
the search for the soul and the demonstration
of the infinite.

The Kev. Frank Sewall, A. M., in the In-
troduction to his translation of Swedenborg's,
De Anima says :

" The one desire and aim animating the entire series of
Swedenborg's scientific and philosophical writings, was his
'search for the soul.' This single aim furnishes us the key to
Swedenborg's mission in the world of science, of philosophy
of theology. To know the nature of spirit and its relation to
matter, or, as the author frequently puts it, 'a knowledge of
the soul and of its intercourse with the body,' was the two-fold
object of his search * * * Where did he seek this knowledge
of the soul ? In its own realm. In the living (and not in the
dead) human body; in the kingdom of uses as exhibited in the
beautiful order, harmony and activities of the human anatomy,
and physiology. The 'Animal Kingdom' meant to Swedenborg
the kingdom of the anima, the realm over which the soul pre-
sides as queen. The relation of the soul to her body, or her
own kingdom and world, was what he first sought to know ;
and through that to know the nature of the soul herself. The
knowledge he obtained in these labors, while not all that he
aimed at, was nevertheless that which peculiarly and preemi-
nently qualified his mind to be recipient of the greater knowl-
edge of the true nature of spirit and of the relation of the
spiritual to the natural world."

Swedenborg's method was first to state and
study the facts; thus to " elicit from them a
vintage of first principle; and then to keep
and refine this wine of truths within the
vessels of the facts, amplifying it whenever
possible to the unfilled capacity of the lat-

1& THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

ter." In pursuing this method he arrived at
certain generalizations, or as he called them
" new doctrines," by which he hoped to pass
from the material organism of the body, to a
knowledge of the soul which is immaterial.
Chief among these was the doctrine of Cor-
respondence, resting upon the equally philo-
sophic and scientific doctrines of Series, Or-
ders, Degrees and Modifications. This doc-
trine of Correspondence as held by him and
used in these investigations is thus stated by
Mr. Sewall :

"Correspondence as seen in the plane of nature only (and it
was only on this plane that Swedenborg up to this time had
discovered it,) consists in such a mutual adaptation of inner and
outer, higher and lower, grosser and more subtle spheres or
bodies, that there may be a reception, communication and
transference of motions and affections from one to the other.
It is therefore the name we give to that kind of intercourse
which is not bodily influx, or to the union that exists, not by
continuity or confusion of substance, but by contiguity and
modification of state. It is the relation of the affluent waves
of ether to the eye ; of the eye to the sensory fiber ;of the fiber to
the cortical gland ; of the gland to the common sensory; of the
sensory to the imagination ; of the imagination to the intellect;
of the intellect to the soul ; of the soul to God. By correspond
ence the outer affects the inner without becoming one with it;
by correspondence things totally different in degree and in
substance are nevertheless so adapted that motions or tremulous
vibrations in one may be continued through the other, or
converted into some modification of the other's state. So the
soul corresponds in general and in every particular to its body . "

Swedenborg hoped by the aid of this doc-
trine, bending his course inward continual-

WHO WAS SWEDENBORG? 13

ly, " to open all the doors that lead to her, and
at length by the divine permission, contem-
plate the soul herself." He did not succeed.
He came instead to the inner parts of the living
body, but not to the soul. The doctrine of
Correspondence as he held it at this time,
could not reveal it. It needed the opening
of spiritual sight to see the soul in its own
spiritual body in its own spiritual world; then
Correspondence with two experimental terms
two visible things, might show their relation
and intercourse.

It was at this time while still eu gaged up-
on the "Animal Kingdom/' at the ripe age
of fifty-six, in the full maturity of his powers,
that Swedenborg was called, as he declares,
" to a holy office by the Lord, who most gra-
ciously manifested Himself to me in person
and opened my sight to the view of the spir-
itual world, and granted me the privilege of
conversing with spirits and angels." " From
that day forth," he says, " I gave up all world-
ly learning, and labored only in spiritual
things, according to what the Lord command-
ed me to write."

The work of the remaining years of this
remarkable life is accessible in English in
some thirty volumes of his theological writ-

14 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

ings. They present a system of psychology
as unique as it is logically consistent, resting
on an analysis of the spiritual world and of
man as a spiritual being, froni " things heard
and seen in the other world; " they unfold
the spiritual sense of the Sacred Scriptures in
accordance with the science of Correspond-
ence as now perceived in its fullness in the
observation of the laws and phenomena of
both worlds at once under the divine guid-
ance ; and they present an orderly, rational
and spiritual theology, derived from the spir-
itual sense of the Scriptures and confirmed in
their very letter ; the whole claiming to be
under the call, guidance and inspiration of
the Lord Jesus Christ, for the founding of a
New Church and the restoration and perfect-
ing of the true Christian Religion.

It is this astounding claim which the ec-
clesiastical and modern critical spirit, each
in its own way and on its own grounds, re-
jects and ridicules ; and yet the doctrines in
these writings are continually asserting them-
selves and attracting, ever and ever, more at-
tention. There is call for rational examina-
tion ; every mind may challenge the claim, for
it is made with appeal to the understanding;
but there will be no compromise, for Sweden*

WHO WAS SWEDENBORG ?

15

borg allows none. The revelations and doc-
trines are the Lord's, not his. Circumspect
we may be, but no one can investigate the
teachings to any purpose, without consider-
ing the mission of the teacher. Swedenborg's
call, his intromission into the spiritual world,
the opening of his understanding to the law
of Correspondence which rules in that world
and explains the origin and order of this
world, the revelation of the spiritual sense
of the Word, and the formulation of its di-
vine doctrine, — all these things are so bound
up and held together, that they must be ex-
amined and considered together. Why such
a call and mission ?

1. He tells us that the Church was dead
in a spiritless formalism, and an equally life-
less speculative discussion of dogma, and that
the Lord would revive it according to His
promise, and restore to the world the spirit-
ual doctrines of faith.

2. That no rational belief in a spiritual
and eternal world remained, and that to re-
store it to men, there was needed the human
experience of life in the spiritual world from
which to deduce in rational light the true
knowledge of that world.

3. That belief in the Word of God, being

16 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

practically dead, would, under the question-
ing of natural learning, become more and
more rejected in the churches. That to pro-
vide against this, it was necessary that the
law of divine creation and revelation, which
is Correspondence, should be learned by ob-
servation and experience in the spiritual
world, and rationally applied to the opening
of the spiritual sense of the Holy Scriptures.

4. That the doctrines of the Christian re-
ligion, being falsified, needed to be re -taught,
and in new forms apprehensible to spiritual
reason, and that for this was needed a teacher
trained in spiritual experience, introduced
into the sphere of heavenly wisdom, and sub-
missive to the illuminating guidance of the
Lord.

5. That, thus, the old order of the Church
having come to its crisis, and being about to
pass away in unbelief, the Lord should ac-
complish his Second Coming in the revela-
tion of the spiritual sense of the divine
Word, and its heavenly doctrines to men.

THE SECOND COMING OF THE LORD.

The Lord always comes with new revela-
tion when the Church He had previously
established among men has become perverted
by them, and is no longer a means of leading

THE SECOND COMING.

17

men to the Lord and establishing His king-
dom among them. At different periods in
the history of His kingdom on earth, He
has made use of men as his instruments.
Thus, when the time came for the institution
of the Jewish Church, He raised up Moses,
who had from his very childhood in Egypt
been educated and prepared for the mission,
to accomplish the work. In like manner,
when the Jewish Church had run its course,
and the Lord came into the world and took
our nature upon Him, He called His twelve
disciples around Him, and educated and in-
structed them, that through their instrumen-
tality the Christian Church might be estab-
lished. And now in these latter days, after
the first Christian Church has finished its
course, and fulfilled the prophecy of its end,
the Lord in accordance with His promise has
accomplished his Second Coming by unveil-
ing the spiritual sense in His Word which is
from Him and is Himself.

The Second Coming of the Lord is not in
person as at His first advent ; for then He
assumed a human nature and glorified it for
reasons of redemption and salvation, that
He might become in His Humanity the vis-
ible God, and acquire to His Humanity " all

18 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

power in heaven and on earth." What He
came to do in His Incarnation He perfectly
accomplished, and needed not to do again ;
nay, because it was a Divine work it is, and
can not be repeated. What was needed for
the sake of separating the evil from the good,
that those who have believed and who do
believe in Him may be saved, and that there
may be formed of them a New Heaven and
a New Church on earth, is such a revelation
of divine goodness and truth in the Word
as will bring the Lord spiritually present in
power and glory.

The Lord, who is the Word, did not, there-
fore, come to men a second time in person on
earth, but by revealing the genuine meaning
of His written Word in which divine truth
is in its light ; and in this He is continually
present. This is His Second Coming " in
the clouds of heaven with power and great
glory ; " for the literal sense of the Word is
as a cloud, and the Spiritual sense as the
glory, by which the Lord as the Son of Man
is revealed in all things of the Word.*
Swedenborg says :

Since the Lord can not manifest Himself in person, and
yet He has foretold that He would come and establish a New

♦Manual of New Church Doctrine, p.

THE SECOND COMING.

19

Church, which is the New Jerusalem, it follows that He will
do it by means of a man, who is able not only to receive the
doctrines of this Church with his understanding, but also to
publish them by the press. That the Lord has manifested
Himself before me, His servant, and sent me on this office,
and that after thi s He opened the sight of my spirit, and thus
let me into the spiritual world, and gave me power to see the
heavens and the hells, and also to speak with angels and
spirits, and this is now continually for many years, I testify
in truth ; and also that from the first day of that call, I have
not received anything which pertains to the doctrines of that
Church from any angel, but the Lord alone while I read the
Word.*

It seems important to- set forth this matter
clearly ; for on Swedenborg's testimony his
theological writings are not in any sense, as
they are so often regarded, a continuation of
his philosophical speculation. There is an
interposition of the Lord, and a new depart-
ure. There is the Divine purpose to open
the spiritual sense of the Word. It must be
accomplished by means of a man ; and the
man, however naturally endowed and trained,
must needs be further prepared by intro-
mission into the spiritual world. Thus he
says, the spiritual sense of the Word could
not " be comprehended, without knowing
how things are in another life, for most
things which are in the internal sense of the
Word have respect to these things, recount
them and involve them."f So of the doc-

* True Christian Religion, n. 779. t Arcana Coelestia, n. 67.

20 THE SCIENCE OP CORRESPONDENCE.

trine which he calls heavenly, " because it is
from the spiritual sense of the Word, and
this is the same as the doctrine which is in
heaven." * It could never have been under-
stood and set forth except after experience
in the spiritual world. And finally, as to
the importance of a knowledge of the
spiritual world itself to the man of the
Church :

" The man of the church at this day knows scarcely any-
thing about heaven and hell, and his life after death, although
they stand forth described in the Word. Yea, also, many who
were born within the church deny these things, saying, in
their heart, Who has come thence and told us ? Lest, there-
fore, this denial, which reigns especially with those who have
much of the wisdom of the world, should also infect and cor-
rupt the simple in heart and faith, Jt has been given me to be
together with the angels, and to speak with them as man with
man, and also to see the things which are in the heavens, and
the things which are in the hells; and thus now to describe
them from things seen and heard, hoping that ignorance may
be enlightened and incredulity dissipated. Such immediate
revelation is made at this day because this is meant by the
coming of the Lord." f

At the threshold of his inquiry into Swed-
enborg's doctrine of Correspondence, and
consideration of its bearings on psychological
problems, the reader is therefore warned of
its dependence upon the fact of his seer-
ship, and knowledge attained by his intro-
mission into the other world. Looking back

* New Jerusalem and its Doctrines, n. 7.
t Heaven and Hell, n. i.

THE SECOND COMING.

21

to his scientific career, he tells us that he saw
its purpose, that "he had been introduced
by the Lord first into the natural sciences,
and prepared from 1710 to 1744, when
heaven was opened to him ; the reason why
he, a philosopher, had been chosen to this
office, being, that spiritual knowledge, which
is revealed at this day, might be reasonably
learned and naturally understood ; because
spiritual truths answer to natural truths,
which originate, flow from, and answer as a
foundation for them.'" When he had run
the circuit of the sciences, he was introduced
to a new world of facts and laws, by the
opening of his spiritual senses ; and thus to
a spiritual science and philosophy which
could never have been discovered without
these facts, and can never be understood
apart from them.

The importance of this experience is finely
shown by Dr. Wilkinson in his biography of
Swedenborg, when speaking of the inter-
course between the soul and the body, and
the inability of philosophy to give the soul
qualities that warrant us to say what it is,
he remarks that " here we see the value of
sight on a difficult point. While the soul
was unknown, its manner of communication

22 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

with the body was necessarily occult, but
when it was actually seen as the man him-
self, with all his looks, members and gar-
ments about him, the matter took a practical
form." "We may illustrate this by man
and his ostensible connections with this
world. Now we see man, and the manner in
which he lays hold upon his objects, which
is clearly typified by his actual handling of
certain things. But suppose for a moment
that we were some other being, and that man
was invisible to us, and that still the objects
were moved from place to place with an ap-
parent design. In this case we should have
a type of what the motions and actions of
the body are to an abstract philosopher. It
would be a kind of ghostly and fearful gal-
vanism, and the existence of something to be
called man, though what could never be
known, would be the last induction of phil-
osophy from the strange events which were
taking place around. Place the seer, how-
ever, the person who can see this powerful
and actual man who is creating them, and
sight itself without a strained faculty, will
account for the whole connection of events.
We see them produced and we see the agent.
Such is the native and substantial function

THE HISTORY OF OPINION.

23

of eyes, whether those of the spirit or the
body, executed in their proper sphere. The
man who can see the soul has done with
abstract philosophy. The spiritual world is
united to the natural by answerable links to
the above. So long as the spiritual is kept
by the philosophers, and consists of intuition
and mathematical points we may well won-
der if it be united with nature; for what love
can consist between the starry firmaments on
one hand and blank being on the other?
There is freezing indifference on either side,
and of course no union. The addition of an
abstract idea to the world, is the world unal-
tered, though a little blurred ; the sinking of
the world in the idea, is on the other hand
idealism or destruction of thought. There is
every reason for ' civil war between the soul
and the body,' and discord between the two
worlds, under circumstances in which one
party to the agreement is essentially unknown,
But thanks be to God, spiritual sight has
again saved us here.*"*

THE HISTORY OF OPINION.

"What we need to be instructed in is, not
merely that the soul is immortal, but what

♦Emanuel Swedenborg. A biographical sketch by James John
Garth Wilkinson, pp. 199, 200.

24 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

the soul is ; and this not alone as regards a
future life, but our present existence. Hith-
erto, perhaps no term in the language has
been so indeterminate as this word soul. In
the old faiths it is a name with no answering
reality; and now in this day, of positive
ideas and strict definitions, we need to define
the soul, to exhibit it to thought, or cease to
use a name for which we have nothing as a
relative.

The history of opinion is not a develop-
ment in this case, but a round of affirma-
tions carrying us back to the point in which
it started on its speculative career. If we
attempt to reduce the ancient opinions to a
general summary we shall find that between
the remotest period of history and the dawn
of Christianity, speculative philosophy had
covered substantially the same ground as that
to-day occupied by the metaphysicians and
materialists.

1. There were those who believed the
soul to be elemental in its nature and there-
fore attributed body to it ; among these, such
as believed in a divine, universally pervading
element, allowed the soul immortality, which
was denied by those who believed in no

THE HISTORY OF OPINION

25

other elements but such as are tangible to
our senses.

2. Another class believed the soul to
consist in the harmony of bodily organiza-
tion, and consequently to be inseparable from
it ; an opinion which re-appears in our day in
very respectable company, and necessarily
concludes against immortality.

3. By others the entire intellectual,
rational, sensual, and vital force of the whole
body was held to be separable and immortal ;
but it was believed to carry away from the
body a pneumatic or ethereal limbus, from
which it could only be disengaged by some
process of purification, and when thus liber-
ated ceased to have body.

This, of course is not an exhaustive classi-
fication of ancient opinion; but it is prac-
tically inclusive, and serves to show, that the
ancient mind, apart from that kind of experi-
ence which philosophers pride themselves in
neglecting — the experience of open seership
— was unable to conceive of the soul as
enjoying any other sensational organization
than that of the material body. In so far as
they were compelled to admit the reality of
some of its sensations, they accounted for the
supposed anomaly on the principle of imper-

26 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

feet development, or abnormal attachment to
nature. They could form no conception of
an outbirth of ideal forms in any other than
a material pabulum, the soul being consid-
ered incapable of substantial organization.

The problem descending to later times was
taken up by Christianity, The doctrine of
the Resurrection, the Transfiguration of
Christ, the vision of Moses and Elias, and of
the angels at Bethlehem and at the sepulchre,
the post-resurrection appearances of the Lord,
imparted to the early disciples the conception
of a spiritual body. Subsequently the Chris-
tian Fathers, Origin, Tertullian and others,
made the application to the visions of the
Seers, maintaining that the soul is the man
himself in a perfectly organized spiritual
body. But unfortunately, perhaps unavoid-
ably, these simple and elevating truths of
the early faith were soon obscured, and the
Fathers treated with neglect. The philoso-
phers overlaid the experimental evidence of
the gospel with the traditional speculations
which it was intended to supersede. In the
darkness which fell upon the Church, the
opinions of the pagan world not only divided
the schools among themselves, but were dis-
cussed with scarcely more regard to the

THE HISTORY OF OPINION.

27

gospel and its revelations than could have
prevailed before it was proclaimed. Working
apart from the data of revelation, and ignoring
the phenomena uncovered to the Bible seers,
the devious reasonings of the Christian schools
worked round, as I said, to the starting point
of the old philosophers. If the thought
changed its form it was only to be shorn of
its one-time grandeur and poetic freshness.
It came at last in the current doctrines of the
soul to a logical demonstration of nothing.

There is no conception in modern specula-
tive thought of spiritual form and organiza-
tion apart from the material body. The
mode of induction is to abstract all the
qualities of the body aod take what is left as
our knowledge of the soul; as Dr. Sears said,
"You must first go through the process of
subtraction, and then look after your remain-
der.'" Body has form, organization; take
these away and you have pure spirit without
form. Denuded to this extent it would be
interesting to know what is left of us ; and we
have for answer, 'thinking principle/ 'pure
essence,' 'a metaphysical entity,' 'a substance
uncompounded and without parts.'* Eun
this to its last dismal absurdity, and you will

*Foregleams of Immortality, p. 27 et seq.

28 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

see that these are only names for nothing.
That which is no substance is nothing. Sub-
stance without form is not given. You may
talk of virtue, goodness, intellect, and so
forth ; but they must attach themselves to a
living subject, else they fade into nothing-
ness, with a name it may be, but without
existence. In the presence of such profitless
verbiage, it is not surprising that many
strong minds, with keen powers of observa-
tion and great respect for things that are
open to sense, should define life as "the
aggregate of the activities of the physical
organism," and thought as a property of the
brain.

SEEKSHIP.

The Bible presents a world of facts to be
investigated, not a set of formulas to be be-
lieved. It unveils principles in human
actions, causes and laws in Providence and
government ; not doctrinal propositions ready
made. And thus it is that in the Bible
there are very few doctrinal projDOsitions
concerning the soul. Its reality is assumed
throughout, its spirituality is assumed, its
human personality is assumed, and its immor-
tality is continually assumed where it is not
directly affirmed. Beyond this there are

SEERSHIP.

29

only disclosures; but what magnificent dis-
closures for the founding of a science of the
spiritual! There are no philosophical propo-
sitions in the Bible regarding the nature of
the soul and the world of souls: but a cloud
of witnesses testify that their "eyes being
opened" they have seen, and offered their
experiences for reason to generalize from.
Grouping all these visions we may say:

1. The Scriptures represent that men
have been permitted to see, and in many
ways to be sensible of spirits and angels out
of the physicial body, though once men on
earth, and now moving among phenomenal
realities not of earth. That is,

2. These persons and things were per-
ceived in a plane within nature and discrete
from it, by spiritual senses touched and
opened for the purpose, and in no case by
physical sense alone.

These things are testified by patriarchs
prophets and seers, from Abraham to John
the revelator ; and their testimony is to be
accounted for. Things which outgo daily
experience have been attested over all the
world by the personal character of the
narrators ; especially when one after another
deposits his stone of experience and the

30 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

unpremeditated building rises under an un-
seen hand into heavenly proportions, and
becomes the only fitting abode of conscience,
affection and religion. The witnesses agree.
Swedenborg coming after them, not only re-
peats their testimony " I saw heaven opened"
but claims a mental preparation in a half-
century of scientific training, and a state of
prolonged seership, enabling him to become
familiar with the spiritual world as an ex-
plorer and an investigator, and thus to explain
the visions of the prophets and to present
a completed temple of spiritual science, into
which their separate testimony fits with the
perfect relation of truth. He tells us that
the disclosures of the Bible mean this:

1. That what we call the soul is the
man himself with an organized spiritual
body, clothed upon with the physical body
which is its perfect correlative and corres-
pondent, and its adaptation to the plane of
nature for primary development and edu-
cation, but passing, when uncased by death,
into sensible cognisance of the spiritual
world; that is

2. Into a world of spiritual substances
and forms, phenomenal to spiritual sensa-
tion, and related to the outer universe as

SEERSHIP.

31

the soul to the body, its correlative and
correspondent.

If this be true, seership is intelligible
and spiritual science is possible. But if it
is not true, if the soul has no organization
and no form, and the spiritual world no
things, then the seers were not seers, and
he who saw heaven opened saw nothing ;
then our beloved dead are not, and we our-
selves are elected to be nothing ; then the
asjnration of science is a cheat and a snare,
because the knower is nobody and there is
nothing to know.

As we have seen, there are three possible
theories, than which no others have been
conceived in the mind and embodied in
language:

1. We may try to think with the
metaphysicians of the soul as disembodied
spirit, that is, a pure simplicity ; that is a
metaphysical point, that is, a logical definition
of nothing,

2. We may think of the emotional and
intellectual life, which we call the soul, as
inseparable from the physical organism; and
then whether you call it with the material-
ists, a property of this organism in defiance
of all logic and in the absence of all proof, or

32 THE SCIENCE OF COPRESPONDENCE.

whether you call it, after the old theology,
and in defiance of common-sense, a vital
spark, waiting nowhere to get its manhood
out of the grave in a final resurrection of
dead bodies, it comes to the same thing;
when the body dies it disintegrates and
personal identity and function are forever
lost.

3. It is difficult to see why in such an
alternative we should not come to the only
theory that remains, the only one that an-
swers the demands of reason, the obser-
vations of life, and the alleged facts of
Revelation, namely : that the soul is an
organized spiritual body living in and by
virtue of a world of spiritual substances,
forces and forms, both interior to the
physical body and its world of sense. Once
admit this doctrine into the court of reason
and there is something to learn ; and the
Lord, through His properly prepared and
commissioned servant, can begin to teach us
on the basis of things "heard and seen."

THE GENEKAL DOCTKINE.

Witli tlie opening of Swedenborg's spirit-
ual senses there was presented to his mind a
new field of induction. There was spread
out before him a new world, with facts to be
studied and laws to be discovered. It was
immediately evident that there are two
worlds, distinct from each other; one in
which all things are spiritual, and the other
in which all things are natural. It was also
evident that spirits and angels in their own
world are in bodies in human form, for he
saw them and talked with them. It was also
evident that their world was in all respects a
world, and not an idea; for he beheld its
firmament and landscape, its sun and all
proceeding from it, related to his spiritual
senses as really, and in all respects similarly,
as this world to his bodily senses. It was
also evident that the two worlds are perfectly
distinct, for he was in both at the same time.
He beheld the two worlds and perceived that
they answered to each other, as cause and
effect. Then it was that his philosophical
doctrines of Degrees and Correspondences

33

34 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

received a new basis of fact, a new field of
illustration, and a new significance as to the
order and law of creation.

DISCRETE DEGREES.

There are continuous degrees which ex-
hibit gradation on the same plane ; as greater
or less degrees of light or heat or pressure.
So, likewise, there are greater or less degrees
of clearness in intelligence or understanding;
and greater or less facility of expression in
speech. These, however, are only differences
of more or less in things on the same plane,
and continuous. But the degree which dis-
tinguishes the understanding from the speech
is discrete, and not continuous. The thought
does not shade off into the expression. The
thought may be more or less clear on its own
plane; and the expression more or less
clear on its plane ; but the planes
are distinct. The thought descends into
the speech and clothes itself, and thus
takes on a new form and function on
a lower plane of existence, without losing
its own form and function in the mind
itself. It is the efficient cause of which
the speech is the effect. The thought is
spiritual, the speech is natural. They belong
to correlated planes of existence, which do

DISCRETE DEGREES.

35

not shade off into each other, bnt are distinct
and joined by their correspondence whereby
the internal operates into the external, as the
cause produces and actuates the effect. Such
is the relation of a mental cause to its phys-
ical effect ; such the relation of the spirit in
its own body to the physical body ; and such
the relation of the spiritual world to the nat-
ural world. They are not opposites, they are
correlati ves : neither are they continuous, but
separated by a discrete degree ; and they are
held in vital connection by Correspondence.

The importance of this knowledge to all
psychological certainty is inexpressible. It is
the missing link that connects and relates the
body and the soul. It is the missing
" bridge w by which to pass the gulf that sep-
arates the "correlated facts of consciousness
and the molecular movements of the brain."
And it is important to dwell a moment on
this fact of the separateness of the two worlds,
which is a revelation, and could never have
been discovered except to the seer experi-
mentally in both worlds ; but which being
known is easily confirmed to reason.

The spiritual world is spiritual. Its sub-
stances are spiritual; its forms are spiritual;
its forces are spiritual. It is a world with

36 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

sensible phenomena ; but it is not therefore a
material paradise here or there in the expanse
of space. It is within the natural world, not
as one box is within another, or an ether in a
vessel, but as the man is within his body.
The mind, which is the man and in the hu-
man form, is while in this world within the
physical body ; and they correspond part to
part to part and function to function. So the
spiritual world is within the natural world,
and they correspond thing to thing, relation
to relation and force to force. This difference
Swedenborg expresses by the term Discrete
degree, because the two worlds are entirely
separate from each other and " must be dis-
cerned in distinct separation." The relation
and bond between them he expresses by the
term Correspondence, because it is the rela-
tion of cause to effect. Broadly speaking, the
spiritual world and the soul are one degree ;
the natural world and the body are another
degree. And because they are distinct and
yet correspond, the spiritual can clothe itself
with the natural, and by influx fill and actu-
ate it. Correspondence as the law of relation
and influx, " depends with absoluteness upon
the separation of the two corresponding
sides, spirit and nature, upon their discon-

DISCRETE DEGREES.

o7

timdty. If the one ran into the other, they
could not correspond; and consequently
could not be united; just as if male and
female were in one person there could be no
marriage."* Dr. Wilkinson says with none
too much emphasis, " It is important just
now to set these most unmystical doctrines or
teachings of Correspondence and its necessary
discontinuity, before us, because attempt is
made in powerful quarters to show that life
and nature are continuous and cohere by lines
of sameness of law. In short, to show that
natural law reigns also in the spiritual world,
and thus that there is only one world, which
in that case presumably may be the natural
world as cognized by the bodily senses. So
long as this is held there can be no knowl-
edge of the spiritual world, or the life after
death, and the belief in both must be weak-
ened accordingly. And then man's own met-
aphysics will be the ruler of belief, and will
shake hands with all that is worst in mate-
rialistic scientism, and take from it the laws
with which it traverses religious faith and
hoj3e and broadens the public road to agnos-
ticism, or to the positivist dogma of annihila-
tion."* Just as surely will the metaphysics

♦Greater Origins and Issues of Life and Death, pp. 267 and 269.

38 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

which seeks to maintain its idealism come to
negation of spiritual life by denying to spirit,
form or function, unless it admits into its
thinking these facts of a distinct spiritual
body and a distinct spiritual world.

THE TWO WORLDS.

This entirely distinct but very real spirit-
ual world exists and subsists from its own
sun, which is pure love from Jehovah God
in the midst of it; and the natural world
exists from its sun which is pure fire, in itself
dead, but sustained and actuated by influx
from the spiritual sun. The author says:

" The reason why there is one sun of the
spiritual world and another sun of the natural
world, is because those worlds are altogether
distinct; and a world derives its origin from
its sun ; for a world in which all things are
spiritual cannot originate from a sun all
things from which are natural, for thus influx
would be physical, which nevertheless is con-
trary to order. That the world existed from
the sun, and not vice versa, is manifest from
an effect of this cause, viz., that the world in
all and each of its parts subsists by means of
the sun, and subsistence demonstrates exist-
ence, wherefore it is said that subsistence is
perpetual existence; from whence it is evi-

THE TWO WORLDS.

39

dent, that if the sun were removed, its world
would fall into chaos, and this chaos into
nothing. That in the spiritual world there
is a different sun from that in the natural
world, I can testify, for I have seen it: it
appears fiery like our sun, nearly of a similar
magnitude, and is at a distance from the
angels as our sun is from men ; but it does not
rise nor set, but stands immovable in a
middle altitude between the zenith and the
horizon, whence the angels have perpetual
light and perpetual spring. The man of
reason, who knows nothing concerning the
sun of the spiritual world, easily becomes
delirious in his idea concerning the creation
of the universe, which, when he deeply
considers it, he perceives no otherwise than
as being from nature, and as the origin of
nature is the sun, no otherwise than as
being from its sun as a creator. Moreover
no one can apprehend spiritual influx
unless he also knows the origin of it; for all
influx proceeds from a sun, spiritual influx
from its sun, and natural influx from
its sun. The internal sight of man, which
is that of his mind, receives influx from the
spiritual sun, but his external sight, which
is that of his body, receives influx from the

40 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

natural sun; and both are conjoined in oper-
ation, in like manner as the soul is conjoined
with the body."

Spiritual things cannot proceed from any-
other source than from love, and love from
no other source than from the Lord who is
love itself ; therefore the spiritual sun from
which, as from their fountains all spiritual
things stream forth, is pure love proceeding
from the Lord who is in the midst of it.
That sun is not the Lord, but is from Him;
it is the nearest sphere around him, from
Himself. By means of this sun the universe
was created by the Lord.

The heat from the sun of the spiritual world
is in its essence love, and the light from that
sun is in its essence wisdom; and the heat
and light from the sun of the natural world
serve them for clothing that they may pass
to nature and to man. These things are
matters of experience; and as facts can be
thought about. As soon as they are con-
sidered reason perceives abundant confirma-
tions. "It is well known that in the Word,
and thence in the common language of
preachers the Divine love is expressed by
fire; as when prayer is offered that heavenly
fire may fill the heart and kindle holy

THE TWO WORLDS.

41

desire. The reason is because fire corres-
ponds to love, and signifies it. That such
fire has heat proceeding from it, appears
plainly from the effects of love. Thus a
man is set on fire, grows warm and becomes
inflamed, as his love is exalted into zeal, or
into the glow of anger. The heat of the
blood or the vital heat of men and animals
in general proceeds solely from love which
constitutes their life. Neither is infernal
fire anything else than love opposite to
heavenly love. Thence it is, that the
Divine love appears to the angels in their
world as a sun, fiery like our sun ; and that
the angels enjoy heat according to their
reception of love from the Lord by means of
that sun. It follows that the light there is
in its essence wisdom; for love and wisdom
are indivisible, since love exists by means of
wisdom and according to it. I have often
seen that spiritual light," he says, " and it
immensely exceeds natural light in bright-
ness and splendor. As light is wisdom, there-
fore the Lord calls Himself the light which
enlighteneth every man. It is believed that
natural lumen, which also is rational, pro-
ceeds from the light of our world ; but it pro-
ceeds from the light of the sun of the spirit-

43 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

ual world, for the sight of the mind flows into
the sight of the eye, thus also the light of the
spiritual world into the light of the natural
world, but not the reverse." *

The heat and light from the sun of the
spiritual world, and all things which exist
from and by means of them, are substantial,
and are called spiritual; and the heat and
light from the sun of this world, and all
things which exist here by means of them, are
material, and are called natural. The two
worlds are quite similar as to external form,
but as to internal form they are quite dis-
similar. A spiritual garden, for example, is
in appearance similar to a natural garden;
but it is living, from the souls who dwell in
it, while a natural garden is made with hands.
The substances of the spiritual world are liv-
ing like the mind itself. The desire of the
will flows into the thought of the under-
standing and fashions it to the form of the
desire ; then the desire in the thought, which
is its own form, descending into the imagina-
tion, presents itself in a mental picture, which
is an object of intellectual sight. All this
takes place within the mind whenever we
think from affection with desire to create and

* Intercourse of the soul and the body. Nos. 4-6.

THE TWO WORLDS.

43

to possess. In the spiritual world its living
atmospheres and substances are immediately
responsive to the mind's activity, and the
idea, which corresponds in the mind to its
desire and thought, projects itself into sub-
stantial forms in the world external to the
mind. The phenomenal spiritual world,
therefore, is created through the minds of
those who dwell in it ; corresponds to the
states of the minds through which it is cre-
ated; and changes with their change. But
in this world, the dead materials of nature
have to be formed and fashioned into fixed
copies of living spiritual forms, into which
life, through the spiritual world may flow ;
just as the mind which would realize
here its idea of what it would have, must
fashion a copy in inert material substances.
The chair is wanted, and thought of, before it is
made ; in the spiritual world when wanted and
thought of it is made, and the owner has it
while he wants it ; but in this world to have it
he must fashion so much dead stuff into the
fixed form of his idea, and then he has it to
go away from and come back to as he wants
it. So of the two worlds in general and par-
ticular ; all things under the spiritual sun
are living, all under the natural sun are dead ;

44 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

all things in the spiritual world are momen-
tarily created, continued and varied by living
heat and light through the states of human
souls ; all things in the natural world are cre-
ated, spaced and fixed in dead material forms
corresponding to the living forms of the spir-
itual world and capable of receiving an influx
of life and actuating force through the spir-
itual world. The natural world is created
through the spiritual world. Created through
it, it corresponds to it. Corresponding to it,
the spiritual world flows into the natural
world, and animates and actuates it, as the
soul flows into the body, — not as becoming
in any way a part of it, but as a distinct act-
uating form and force within it in all and
every part of it. Why is a dead sun and
world wanted ?

" The cause of the creation of the dead sun is, that all
things may be fixed, stated, and constant in the ultimates, and
that from this ground things may exist, which shall be abid-
ing and everlasting. The terraqueous globe, in which, upon
which, and about which, such things exist, is as a basis and
firmament ; for it is the last work in which all things end, and
upon which they rest. It is also a womb out of which effects,
which are the ends of creation, are produced." *

We see in the light of this teaching from
facts, the error of those who deny a dead
material world. Without it there could be

* Divine love and wisdom. No. 165.

THE TWO WORLDS.

45

no creation. Spiritual things could not be
permanent. Man could have no personal
life ; no permanent states, The real reasons
of this necessity are finely given by Dr.
Wilkinson in answer to the question, "Why
is a dead sun wanted?" "For the same rea-
son that the human body is wanted for the
inhabitants of nature. Man has to be cre-
ated; that is to say, separated and dis-
tanced from the creator in order that he may
be a personal existence. He cannot begin
his career in the spiritual world, because then
lie would be a projection from the Divine
into nothing) the concept would be as of a
force without a recipient vessel to hold it."
This is the root of error, it may be remarked,
in all past metaphysics, with its " intellectual
entities" and "metaphysical points," and
"uncompound substance without body and
without parts;" and the modern idealism
that discourses of man as "an idea or thought
of God," without any personal organism, is
equally unreal and unthinkable. Life must
have an organism to operate a function ; and
the organism must be twofold, spiritual to
receive life, and at first material to give per-
manence to spiritual forms, and react against
the inflowing life. "Dead matter," continues

46 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

Dr. Wilkinson, "is the only thing that can ar-
rest the divine life, and be animated by it into
an appearance of life ; which everlasting ap-
pearance is man's life. To produce this death -
matter is the last office of the natural sun.
That sun must be dead to effect this end. It
is the same problem as man's arising from
unconscious enbryohood and infancy into
personal and mental existence; he springs
from apparent non- entity in these respects
into a marked individual. This he can only
do through experiences, all of which are
transacted and gained through the natural
brain and material body. The sun, the foun-
tain of matter, space and time, has to make
these conditional things for this use. All
mental or personal development, to be last-
ing, must begin at the bottom; even all
angelhood must rise from the ranks, and be
a mere private soldier of Christ here, before
he is a Captain above. And this is why a
mortal or terrene body is required to indi-
vidualize by the first and lowest experiences,
and to make the vessel which hereafter can
receive and hold the divine projection of
deathless life. We know that matter or
dead natural substance exists; we know that
our embodiment through it is the condition

THE TWO WORLDS.

47

of our being in this world. We know that
it fixes us to our place and time. For us that
is its function; we know by abundant exact
Revelation that when this body dies we are
taken out of it and live forever in another
state. What then is the office of the matter?
To give us permanence here and hereafter.
Our higher minds are founded upon our nat-
ural minds, whose fixity is taken up into
them by an inner and most organic memory
of which we are unconscious, but which is
the outer vessel of our immortal state. The
sun then ministers to this; under divine de-
sign it is dead in order to its ministry." *

The spiritual world is the world of causes,
and the natural world is one of effects flow-
ing from such causes. The living organisms
and forms of the spiritual world dispose cor-
responding forms in the natural world, and
rest in them. Life flows in through the spir-
itual forms, into the inert natural forms,
which it actuates and causes to react. Such
reaction serves to develope, form, reform and
perfect the spiritual.

" Nature is not able to dispose life to anything, for nature in
itself is totally inert. For the dead thing to act upon the liv-
ing, or the dead force upon the living force, or what
is the same, the natural upon the spiritual, is quite
♦Greater Origins and Issues of Life and Death, pp. 403, 404.

48 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

against order, and therefore to think it is against the
light of sane reason. The dead or the natural thing may in-
deed in many ways be perverted or changed by external acci-
dents, but yet it cannot act upon life ; but life acts into it ac-
cording to the change of form induced." *

We are to think distinctly, therefore, of
these three things : God, the spiritual world
and the natural world. God created
through the spiritual sun, the spiritual
world, an image and likeness of the infinite
things in himself which He would put into
the making of man's spiritual nature. Then
through the spiritual world He created the
natural world, an image and likeness of the
spiritual, and of corresponding things He
would put into man's earthly nature. The
end is man, who is a microcosm, embodying
in himself a little spiritual world and a little
natural world.

THE TWO BODIES.

Man during this life is an inhabitant of
both worlds. The spirit, which is the real
man, has its own body organized of spiritual
substances in the human form, corresponding
in every organ and sense with the physical
body. The material body is organized of
dead substances to be the covering and in-
strument of the spirit, which is the real

* Divine Love and Wisdom. N. 166.

THE TWO BODIES.

49

man. What Swedenborg saw, and knew by-
living experience, he could urge upon ra-
tional grounds. Thus he says : " All the
rational life which appears in the body be-
longs to the spirit ; for the body is material,
and materiality, which is proper to the body,
is added, and as it were almost adjoined to
the spirit, in order that the spirit of man
may live and perform uses in the natural
world, whereof all things are material and
in themselves void of life. And since what
is material does not live, but only what is
spiritual, it may be evident that whatever
lives in man is his spirit, and that the body
only serves it as an instrument is subser-
vient to a living force. It is said, indeed, of
an instrument that it acts, moves, or strikes ;
but to believe that these acts are those of
the instrument, and not of him who acts by
means of it, is a fallacy. Since everything
that lives in the body, and from life acts and
feels, belongs exclusively to the spirit, and
nothing of it to the body, it follows that the
spirit is the real man, and that the spirit is
in a form similar to the body ; for every-
thing in him, from his head to the sole of
his foot, lives and feels." " From these
considerations it may be seen that the spirit

50 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

of man is in a form as well as his body, and
that its form is the human ; that it enjoys
senses and sensorieswhen separated from the
body, just the same as when it was in it ;
and that all the life of the eye, and all the
life of the ear, in a word, all the sensative
life man enjoys belongs not to his body but
to his spirit ; for his spirit is in them and in
every minutest part thereof. Hence it is
that spirits see, hear and feel the same as
men; but after separation from the body
their perceptions are all of things in the spirit-
ual world. The natural sensation he has in
the physical body is by means of the mate-
rial which is adjoined to it ; but even then he
enjoys spiritual sensation at the same time
by thinking and willing. These observa-
tions are made in order that the rational
man may be convinced that man in himself
is a spirit, and that the corporeal frame
adjoined to him for the sake of performing
functions in the natural world, is not the
man but only an instrument for the use of
his spirit." *

The question arises here, as to the reason
for this connection between the soul and the
natural body, and the mode of it. In gen-

* Heaven and Hell. N. 432, et seq.

THE TWO BODIES.

51

eral the answer has been given in what was
said of the necessity for a dead sun and ma-
terial world, and man's birth and experience
in it, as a basis and containent of what is
spiritual ; and more will follow on this point
in due course. Dr. Wilkinson has given an
illustration of the connection of the spirit
with the body, as to its reasons and modes,
so striking and helpful that it is introduced
here at length.

" The soul is connected with the body for
the same reason as we are connected with the
persons, objects, and circumstances that sur-
round us, and which answer to our wants and
interests. In a similar manner the body
answers to the wants of the soul, being
the soul's wife, the soul's friend, the soul's
house, the soul's office, the soul's uni-
verse. It is engaged to the service of the
soul; shaped into usefulness by the soul's
ministrations. As the hand shapes the pen,
and then writes with it, so the soul forms
the body, and then makes use of the proper-
ties resulting from the form. The connection
between the soul and the body is not more
mysterious than the connection between the
pen-maker and the pen, excepting that our
knowledge of the pen is so much more com-

52 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESP O NDENCE.

plete than our knowledge of the body. A
science of the body, had we such that dis-
played its uses, or its specific fitness to serve
the soul, would as evidently give the motives
of the attachment of the soul to the body, as
the capabilities of the pen account for its con-
nection with the fingers of the ready writer.
In both cases it is the bond of service,
of liking, of utility; for to intelligent
life what other connecting principle is possi-
ble ? If this is too simple for philosophers,
still it is the ground of every connexion they
themselves form with man or thing.

"For the purpose of breaking abstruseness
from the argument, let us look upon the
natural body as the well furnished house, the
admirable circumstance and worldly fortune
of the soul. Then, steadily regarding the
soul as the man, something like the follow-
ing analogical discourse may result from this
point of view, in which we take our stand
inwards, to gain distance for the object.

" The soul being the man or real body, the
natural body represents the appliances and
arts of life, whether economic or aesthetic.
The eye is its window, telescope, microscope,
and answers to the series of means that trans-
parent substance lends to vision, and which

THE TWO BODIES.

53

are as curious and exquisite for their appear-
ance as they are excellent for use: for the
eye receives the finest impressions from
things, and gives the finest expressions from
the soul. So likewise the ear is the hearing-
trumpet of the real body, which would other-
wise be deaf to the music of nature ; it
embraces all the means of reverberation,
whether in the free air, or of cheerful voices
from household ceiling and walls, or of
stately sounds from the long-drawn aisle and
fretted vault : in short, both the whole in-
strumentality and the whole architecture of
sound. But the nose is to the real body the
prophecy of devices that have not yet entered
into arts ; full as it is of membranous par-
terres and vacant aviaries for odors ; for
hitherto, aromas are but casual visitants ;
they come and go in brief seasons with the
fitful winds, and where is the vessel that can
hold them ; hence the nose of flesh is defi-
cient in circumstance, and we can only iden-
tify it somewhat barbarously as the scent
bottle of the real nose. To pass over the
other senses, we find that the legs are the
outward art of locomotion, from passive to
active ; from the nails of the toes to the wheel
of the knee and the globe of the hip ; in short,

U THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

from the walking-stick to the railroad ; tlie
real body uses them in nature, whether as
the staff of its lowliness, or the means of its
swiftness, or the equipage of its pride; they
are the columns of movement ; the rich soul's
carriage, and the poor soul's crutches. But
the arms and hands are all the finer machin-
eries or inventions that are wielded directly
by the arms and hands of the soul ; they are
the pen and the sword ; the instrument of
many strings ; strength and manipulation in
their bearings ; in short, the mechanics of
intelligence, whereby nice conveniences of
truth are gathered in the dwelling of the
soul. Then the abdomen is its kitchen, pre-
paring from all things in its indefinite stores
one universal dish — even the blood of life, to
be served in repasts for the spiritual man ;
the viand of viands, varying from hour to
hour, and suited with more than mathematic
truth to the appetite and constitution of the
eater. Then again, the chest distributes with
a power of wisdom dictated from the halls
above, this blood, the daily bread and wine
of the body of the soul, and the wisdom that
ordained, enters the feast, and it becomes a
living entertainment. And the brain is the
steward and keeper of the animated house,

THE TWO BODIES.

55

receiving order and law from the soul or
brain -man, and transplanting them into its
mundane economy. Yea, and the brain is
its natural universe, its wide spread land-
scapes, its illimitable ocean, its royal library,
studio, theatre, church, and whatever else is
a place of universal light and contemplation.
And lastly, the skin is the dress of the soul
in every kind, convenient, beautif ul, official ;
and it is also the very mansion itself ; for our
houses are but the largest suits, admitting
our domestic movements.

"By this artifice of holding out our bodies
before us, we illustrate in a plain way, the
connection or Correspondence between the
soul and the body ; and though there be
other motives of connection, it is sufficient to
remark for the present, that by the foregoing
signs, it is because the body is so replete with
exquisite convenience, that it is the domestic
establishment of the soul. Given a tenement
of the kind, so royal with apparatus, and it
is impossible that the soul, to whose wants it
answers, should not live in it, and use, that
is to say, animate it. If the soul were not a
tenant on such invitation, it would be stupider
than the birds and beasts, which are drawn
by far lesser affinities to their own conven-
ient lairs."

bt> THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

" When we speak of the connexion be-
tween the body and the soul, we are apt at
first to think, that it is a single link or act,
but this is an insufficient conception. There
are as many different modes of connection as
there are wants in the soul, and organs, parts
and particles of the body. There are
as many different modes as there are pos-
sible species of contact in the great and the
little creation. The soul is connected in one
way with the brain, in another with
the lungs, in another with the belly,
again in another with the skin. To
make this clear, recur to the house
and its furniture. The inhabitant owns
everything contained in it. Upon one piece
of furniture he reclines, upon another he
sits, at another he writes, upon others he
treads ; some contain his viands, some delight
him with harmonious sounds, and some look
down from his walls, and gratify him by arts
and proportions; and with all these, and
many more, he is connected. ~Now in each
case it is the shape, make, form, or proper-
ties whereby the thing serves its purpose,
that is the means of his connexion with it.
If he sits at his desk, it is because it is such
or such a structure, and serves him for read-

THE TWO BODIES.

5?

ing and writing ; he never makes a mistake
of sitting for these purposes at his coal-skuttle.
Apply this to the body, and we find that its
dweller uses every implement there also ac-
cording to its form. The reverent soul
kneels in the knees, because they are natural
kneelers. The enquiring soul peers through
the eyes, for they are born windows. The
make of the organ is the handle whereby the
inner man grasps and uses it." *

In general then man lives first in this world
as to his conscious sensations, plans and de-
terminations, by virtue of the fact that his
spiritual body is clothed in a corresponding
and perfectly adjusted physical body, through
which his senses open out upon the natural
world. Its objects and relations thus supply
him with objects of affection and thought,
which in the mind become again the object
of a higher thought and more interior affec-
tion. At the death of the physical body,
which consists in such disorder and disar-
rangements of parts that it no longer corres-
ponds to the spiritual body, nor fits the mind
as an instrument, whence the spirit is unable
to inflow and actuate it, then the man awakes
to sensible cognizance of the objects of the

* Human Body and its connection with Man ; pp. 269-272.

58 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

spiritual world. During this life, however,
he is as to his spirit present in the spiritual
world, though not sensibly perceiving it; and
is in unconscious association with spirits who
have put off the material body and live con-
sciously in that world. By means of such
unconscious association with spirits, affec-
tions, thoughts, ideas and impressions are
awakened, formed, modified and multiplied
in man, and adopted by him as his own in
freedom according to the thought of his
reason.

MENTAL PHENOMENA.

Spirits do not know that they are with
man, any more than man knows he is with
spirits. Both may know it in a general way
from doctrine, but neither perceives the other
under ordinary conditions. Spirits perceive
man's thoughts and feel his affections as their
own, and think of them as in their own
minds, and thus modify, multiply and extend
them in their own experience. This action
of the spirits with man is in turn communi-
cated to his mind; then thoughts and affec-
tions flow in and are perceived by him as his
own. This fact, together with certain laws
of the spiritual world, being known, mental

MENTAL PHENOMENA.

phenomena, which have been found perplex-
ing, are easily explained.

Space and time, for example, in the spir-
itual world, are not fixed and permanent,
irrespective of the percipient, but are depend-
ent upon the changing states of the spirits
and angels. This distinction between the
two worlds has already been pointed out, and
referred to the law that one world is alive
and the other dead. It results that thought
directed to another brings presence, and
thought from affection or desire brings asso-
ciation and conjunction of minds. You can-
not love the same evil without having its
infernal crew for your intimate bosom com-
panions; and the thoughts the activities of
your love awaken in them, will be commu-
nicated to your own minds. You cannot
love any heavenly good, or think any divine
truth which is an object of angelic thought and
love, without bringing the angels present and
the activities of their love into your own mind.

Then again, phenomena in the spiritual
world are produced by the projection of the
states of the beholders upon its background
of substance, and are more or less permanent
according to the permanence of the states
producing them.

60 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

1. There are the real appearances and
scenery of that world produced from the
common and abiding states of those who
inhabit and use them, and continuing with
modifications according to the variations of
those states. The heavenly habitations, for
example, are permanent because the funda-
mental states of the dwellers in them are
permanent; but they are constantly varying
like living things, because the fundamental
states of character are ever experiencing vari-
ations.

2. There are also in the spiritual world
representative forms capable of being pro-
duced and modified at will for specific pur-
poses, as if an artist might project his ideal
upon the canvas without brush or pigments,
by willing and thinking it there.

3. There are also, magical representations
capable of being produced in the same way,
which represent no reality, but only the
phantasy which, for evil purposes, mischiev-
ous spirits desire to induce and make ap-
pear as real.

It will appear then from man's ud conscious
association with spirits, and these universal
facts of the spiritual world, how certain men-
tal phenomena are to be explained.

MENTAL PHEMOMENA.

61

Man being as to his spirit in the spiritual
world, in unconscious association with spirits
there, who were once men and women on
earth, the activities of their affection and
thought flow in to excite, accelerate, and
modify in a thousand ways man's thoughts,
ideas and feelings. Affections are excited,
thoughts called forth and others injected;
and they are entertained, and rejected or ac-
cepted, according to man's will and bent, as
his own. Thence come not only the poet's
inspiration, the author's flight of imagination,
the inventor's insight, and the merchant's
foresight, but all forms of mental activity in
wakefulness and sleep, in sound and unsound
minds, as man's dominant purpose determines
his spiritual associates. His associates will
be such as correspond to the affections of
his love which determine his thoughts. The
spirits with him are of the same general
state as he is ; good spirits associated with
heaven, and operating into and by corre-
sponding affections and thoughts good and
true ; and evil spirits associated with hell,
and operating into and by corresponding
evil affections and appetites, and falsities and
fallacies.

The phenomena of dreams have in this

62 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

their explanation. Sleep being partial
through any of many possible mental and
physical conditions, associate spirits ap-
proach, and carry on a train of thought
previously engaged in, or inject by their own
thinking new and incongruous ones, and
present real or fantastic images to the sight
of the imagination. The will being uncon-
scious, and an abnormal state giving them
access to the mental organism, they can do
with, and present before the mind, what
they will.

Man's freedom and rationality being im-
paired by mental conditions, caused by a
disorderly life or by some injury to the
mind's instrument, the physical brain, as in
the various forms of insanity, spirits can
possess and dictate his actions according to
their conceits, even in direct opposition to
his prevailing character before disease.

As a man in a mob without the guidance
of reason may do what the mob wills and im.
pels ; so a man may from mental causes
bring himself into spiritual associations?
which, in a moment of excitement or sudden
provocation will prove too strong for his
judgment, and carry him away into a fit of
so-called " emotional insanity." By harbor-

MENTAL PHENOMENA.

63

ing hatred and revenge, and brooding over
a special grievance, or by habitual indulgence
of passion, man associates with himself spir-
its who may in a moment tear him away from
all thought of res train t ; and lash him into
the act of murder. So of other passions. So
on a high tower, if he dwells with fear on
the possibility of falling. So in the presence
of an epidemic of disease, or of any danger,
if he dwells upon the subject long or mor-
bidly, he puts himself into the power of
spirits, and, becoming a prey to the panic
which they induce, arrests or disorders the
common influx into the bodily organs, and
opens the way for evil spirits to flow in and
control the functions of both mind and body.

It has been said that though man even
while living in this world is in the midst of
spirits, yet the spirits are not aware that they
are with man, any more than he is conscious
of their presence. " The reason is that they
are conjoined immediately as to the affect-
ions of the will, and mediately as to the
thoughts of the understanding ; for man
thinks naturally and spirits think spiritually,
and natural thought and spiritual make one
only by correspondence. " MediumsMp y as
in spiritualism, clairvoyance, and occult

64

THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

adeptship, constitutes an infraction of this
order. In such cases spirits invade man's
consciousness through the consent or col-
lapse of his freedom and rationality. They
enter into his thought and memory, and thus
possess £nd control all his mental and bodily
faculties. The controling spirit once having
gained posession of the will and memory of
the medium, may talk or write under any
name, relate events, locate stolen property,
or reveal anything within the contents of
the memory of the medium, or any person or
spirit present ; he may, from his superior
knowledge of causes and their tendency to
results, even foretell events to an extent.
He can induce subjective states which, flow-
ing down into the plane of sense, become il-
lusions and apparitions, which are perceived
as altogether real things ; and so far as any
persons bring themselves into consulting
sympathy with the medium and his controll-
ing spirits, these illusions may be induced
upon them also, so that they would believe
and declare the sensation to be objectively
real, when it is not in the least so. The old
necromancy and enchantment, when not the
pretense of wicked men, was the trick of
wicked spirits performed in this way through

MENTAL PHENOMENA.

65

susceptible mediums. Such communication
is fraught with danger to the soul, because
u when spirits thus speak with man they are
in the same principles as the man with whom
they speak, whether they are true or false ;
and further, they call them into activity, and
by means of their own affection conjoined to
that of the man strongly confirm them."
Hence it is evident that the spirits who speak
with man, or operate manifestly upon him,
are similar to himself ; in similar affection?
and thus in similar thought; and as when
" the blind lead the blind, both fall into the
ditch," they can only confirm each other in
their common principles.

Mesmerism belongs to the same class of
phenomena, only in this case the control is
limited to the will and knowledge of the
mesmerizer, who can only impress his own
thoughts and determinations on the subject,
but can not enter into his memory unless he
be at the same time a mind-reader.

Mind-reading and thought transference is
often the result of undeveloped mediumship,
and is accomplished by means of spirits who
take from one and give to the other. It is
possible, however, for one mind in full pos
session of itself and utterly free from trance

66 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

to receive impressions from and give im-
pressions to another mind. It is the common
law of the spiritual world, and only requires
a sensitive subject capable of a degree of
abstraction from the bodily senses. Spirits
are always communicating their thoughts,
and reading ours as their own ; and given
a fit subject with attention fixed upon an-
other with strong desire to read what is in
his mind, or with thought determined to
another in strong desire to impress it, and
he may take or give as really, if not as
readily, as if both were in the spirit.

Co-incidences, "premonitions and warnings
are to be similarly explained. Spirit com-
municates with spirit, in the common atmos-
phere of the spiritual world, with a whole
company of sympathizing spirits living en-
tirely in that world, to help on the commu-
nication. Impressions conveyed in this way
may be perceived even as sensations, though
no natural sight or sound, or other bodily
sensation, is actually produced, but only the
appearance of such, presented subjectively
and perceived in the mental plane of the
senses

SOURCES OP INFLUX.

It will be seen from the foregoing that the

SOURCES OF INFLUX.

67

spiritual world is the source of all the life of
man in nature, invisibly influencing the
course of all things here. " The spiritual
world contains, and in a manner consists of
all the men and women who have ever died
on earth. They are an all -prevalent plane of
induction over us, most closely united to us
by our individual and special correspond-
ence with them." The spiritual world con-
sists of Heaven, Hell and the world of spir-
its, intermediate between them. It is thus
divided by the necessary separation of the
wholly good from the wholly evil, and of
both from those who are in the undeveloped
state which belongs to men on earth and
spirits recently entered into the spiritual
world. Let us endeavor now to understand
this distinction. Man in the world lives two
lives ; one internal and the other external ;
for he can think one thing and say another,
or will one thing and do another. One is
the life of the interiors and the other of the
exteriors of his spirit ; for what the body
does, is only an effect from the interiors and
exteriors of his spirit, since the body is only
an instrument. From external thought and
affection one may talk of love to the neigh-
bor and love to God, when yet in his inter-

68 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

nal affection and thought he neither fears
God nor cares for his neighbor. He may
also see and judge of his exterior thought
from the interior ; he may see the evils of
his external life and judge and combat them
them from interior purpose. On the other
hand he may see what is just and right from
interior thought, and from exterior thought
and affection incline to the opposite. He
may even love what is just and right as to
his interiors, and yet in his exterior thought
and affection from want of instruction or from
the power of habit, or failure to conquer and
conform the exterior to the interior, he may
do things contrary to what is just and right.
All men in this life are more or less in
this conflict, or non-correspondence, between
the interior and exterior life. They enter
the spiritual world in this mixed state of
good and evil, truth and falsity. Their judg-
ment consists in the revelation of the quality
of their ruling, which is the interior, love;
and in reducing exteriors into conformity
with it, and in their further instruction and
preparation for heaven if good, or on the con-
trary for their final home among the evil in
hell.

All men pass first, therefore, into an inter-

SOURCES OF INFLUX.

69

mediate world of spirits, where they are
judged, instructed, disciplined and prepared
for their final home. This is a gradual work,
requiring many changes of state, answering
to a lapse of time with us. When we con-
sider the immense number constantly enter-
ing the spiritual world, one, it has been
estimated, with every swing of the pendulum ;
when we consider the state of most, their
ignorance of spiritual things, their involve-
ment in complex thoughts and affections, and
how few of even the interiorly good are in
the knowledge and life necessary to bring
their exterior life into harmony and corres-
pondence with their interior will and purpose ;
the changes, and the lapse of time necessary
for the working out of the interior love into
the whole exterior life and thought, — we may
form some conception of the multitudinous
population of the world of spirits, and the
complex influences upon human minds of
which it is the source. It is in immediate
association with this world of recently de-
parted spirits, that man as to his spirit lives.

The first state of man in the world of
spirits is similar to his state in society here,
except an increased sense of life and freedom
above what he enjoyed in this world. He

70 THE SCIENCE OP CORRESPONDENCE.

observes how others speak and act, and
adapts himself to them, and to his surround-
ings, as he had been used to do in the world,
by the exteriors of his spirit. He inquires
for friends, meets them and talks with them.
He learns about the nature and laws of that
world; and as he becomes accustomed to his
new life his sense of freedom is increased,
and where he felt obliged to conceal and dis.
semble his affections and thoughts he finds
himself less inclined, and is less able to do so.
The pressure of his interior life to express
itself reveals the state of his ruling love and
brings the exteriors into conformity with it.
He must become the form of his own love
and nothing else. Everything that is not in
agreement with it must be cast off. This is
the divinely appointed order; and this is the
judgment. Thus the evil are separated from
the good, and man comes into his own life
and remains in it forever. It is the life of hell
with those who have loved themselves and
the world above all things; and it is the life
of heaven with those who have loved the
Lord above all, and their neighbor as them-
selves. The evil cast themselves into hell;
and the good, after preparation by instruc-
tion, are conducted under the Lord's auspices
to their place in heaven.

SOURCES OF INFLUX.

71

There are three heavens and innumerable
societies in each, arranged according to the
varieties of love and intelligence with the
angels. So also with the hells which are the
inversion of the heavens. The angels are
happy because they are in a state of order,
their interiors and exteriors being in corres-
pondence, in conjunction with the Lord, in
harmony with each other, and surrounded by
corresponding forms of order and beauty.
But the wicked spirits are unhappy in hell,
because they are in a state of disorder, at
enmity against the Lord, in conflict with each
other, and surrounded by the forms of
their internal barrenness of life and desolation
of delight.*

The life of the Lord through heaven, flows
into the good in the world of spirits; and thus
by them is adapted to man. The life of the
Lord perverted into the opposite in the hells,
flows into the interiorly evil in the world of
spirits ; and thus, by them is applied to the
evils and falsities in man, exciting, confirming
and augmenting them.

Thus all men are subject to influx in "three
great directions, namely : laterally, vertically
and abyssally. The vertical influx is from

*Manual of Doctrine, pp. 57-58.

72

THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

heaven, which maintains all order and keeps
all things alive. The lateral influx is from
the world of spirits; and from the good and
evil populations on the earth in connection
with them. The abyssal influences are from
the hells, from which disease and death per-
petually assault us. All these are of human
conditions, and are virtually 4 in us, from us,
and of us.' They are firmaments of influx
above and below, and operate by induction;
they are forces of influx at the sides, and act
by spiritual pressure. Hence it is that evil
powers operate generally and not according
to the lives of individuals. Wherever a
swamp and putridity of circumstance lies,
they are congenially attracted, and godly and
godless folk are smitten if they dwell upon
that region. All who do not dwell there, if
they correspond to the infernal influences in
their lives and characters, will in the here-
after likewise perish.' "*

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX.

We are now prepared to enter more fully
into the consideration of Correspondence and
influx. Correspondence is of the natural
world with the spiritual ; of the internal with
the external. It is the law of the causal

*Greater origins and issues of Life and Death, pp. 41-42.

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 73

relation of the two worlds ; and thus of causes
and effects in either world separately. The
whole natural world corresponds to the
whole spiritual world; and every single thing
in the natural world to something in the
spiritual world which is its cause. Thus
heat corresponds to love, and light to wis-
dom; the heart corresponds to the will and
the affections, and the lungs to the under-
standing and its thoughts. "The spiritual
term is on one side and the natural on the
other, and the two are equated ; what love is
in the spiritual world and in man, that heat
is in the natural world and in the human
body ; what the will and the affections are in
the soul, that the heart and the streaming
arteries are in the body; what the under-
standing and the thoughts are in the mind
that the lungs and their internal ramifica-
tions and air-cells, and their breaths and
breathings, are in the deep places of the chest.
Everything, in short, corresponds to some
spiritual thing ; is in active partnership with
it; and could not long exist without it."

All and everything in the created universe
has such correspondence with man that it
may be said that man is a little universe.
All and everything in man which is accord-

74 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

ing to order, is an image and correspondent
of God- Man. Correspondence is, therefore,
first between God, who is Absolute Man,
and the whole heaven, which is in the human
form from Him. God is very Man. In the
heavens there is no other idea of God but
the idea of a Man; because the divine prin-
ciples which cause the angels to be angels ?
taken together are God, and every angel is a
man, and every angelic society is in the human
form, and the whole heaven is a Grand Man,
from correspondence with His Infinite Man-
hood. An Eternal Mind is an eternal Man.
This is the God of Revelation, who is a
Divine Person of Infinite Love and Wisdom,
capable of showing Himself to men as a
Divine Man, and desiring to be known and
worshipped as a loving and wise God in
human form. "God is Man," is the postulate
of reason also. Nothing proceeds out of any-
thing except it first be in it; and the spiritual
and natural worlds conspiring to the human
form, and to the service of men and angels,
who are "men in lighter garment clad," can
only proceed from a God who is Absolute
Man, and who produces from Himself more
and more perfect images of His Manhood.
In the work on Heaven and Hell, Sweden-

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 75

borg shows in order: I. 1 hat the Lord i. e.
the Lord Jesus Christ, who is Jehovah in
His Divine Humanity, is the God of heaven.
II. That the Divine of the Lord, i. e. the
divine love and wisdom proceeding from
Him, makes heaven. III. That heaven con-
sists of innumerable societies ; and that every
society is a heaven in less form, and every
angel in least. IV. That every angel is in a
perfect human form ; every society of angels,
in a larger and more perfect human form;
and the whole heaven in one complex, as one
Grand Man. All this because the Lord
who is God Man creates men images and
likenesses of Himself as to the human form,
with indefinite varieties of that form; so
that when brought into true order by re-
generation, each may image the Lord differ-
ently from all others, and out of the har-
mony this variety, may be constituted one
grand image and likeness of the infinite things
in the Lord. Thus it is that the whole heaven
corresponds on the one hand to the Lord,
and on the other to the human form, or to
the members, organs and viscera in man.
On the one hand the spiritual organic
form of the angel, corresponds to principles
in the Lord and from Him ; and because

1Q THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

there is correspondence there is influx and
reception of those principles. It is thus the
life of the Lord makes the life of the angel,
not by continuity but by correspondence ; by
similarity of form, and co-operation of the
form actuated with the principle actuating.
On the other hand the angelic form corre-
sponds to some specific organic form in the
human body, and the life of the angel to the
function of that organ. And as all the
members and organs of the body are grouped
and related according to function to the
whole human form and orderly life of man ;
so the angels are associated according to
similarity of life, and related to the whole
human form, by the Divine Human of the
Lord which flows in and is received by
each according to his relation to the whole.
By correspondence with the Lord, heaven
receives His life, each for all and all for
each; by correspondence with the human
form, all things in man subsist through
heaven from the Lord.

This explanation is offered to guard
against the conclusion that because the Lord
is the only life, therefore the life of angel
or man is the Lord's life, and that man or
angel is the Lord. The Lord is the only

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 77

life, and angels are only recipient forms of
that life; they are recipients of it be-
cause their angelic forms correspond. When
the divine life with its goods and truths,
flows into the corresponding angelic forms,
it take on new forms and functions which
are angelic life; when this life again flows
down into the corresponding forms of man's
natural mind, it is neither divine nor angelic
life, but it corresponds to them, i. e., it takes
on new forms and functions which are man's
natural life ; and finally, when life flows down
into the corresponding organs of the body, it
takes on new forms and functions corre-
sponding with the others but distinct from
them. The idea of the Lord and of heaven,
and of the organs and functions of the body,
is therefore to be an idea of distinct things
which correspond ; the external is an image
of the internal, and the life and function it
receives is on its own plane like that of the
internal on its plane. Correspondence is of
the Lord with heaven ; thus of the highest
heaven with the middle heaven, of the
middle heaven with the lowest ; then a
correspondence of heaven with the corporeal
forms in man, which are called his organs,
members and viscera. This correspondence

78 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

is described by Swedenborg, as follows, in
the work on " Heaven and Hell":

" Heaven is distinguished into two king-
doms, of which one is called the celestial
kingdom, and the other the spiritual king-
dom. The celestial kingdom in general
corresponds to the heart, and to all things
of the heart in the whole body; and the
spiritual kingdom to the lungs, and to all
things of the lungs in the whole body. The
heart and the lungs also make two kingdoms
in man ; the heart reigns there by the arteries
and veins, and the lungs by the tendinous
and motor fibres, both of them in every force
and action. In every man, in his spiritual
world, which is called his spiritual man,
there are also two kingdoms ; one is of the
will and the other is of the understanding;
the will reigns by the affections of good, and
the understanding by the affections of truth:
these kingdoms also correspond to the king-
doms of the heart and lungs in the body.
In like manner in the heavens : the celestial
kingdom is the voluntary of heaven, and
there the good of love reigns ; and the spiri-
tual kingdom is the intellectual of heaven,
and there truth reigns : these are what corre-
spond to the functions of the heart and lungs

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 79

in man. It is from that correspondence
that heart in the Word signifies will, and
also the good of love; and the breath of the
lungs, understanding, and the truth of faith.
Hence also it is that the affections are as-
cribed to the heart, although they are not in
it nor from it.

(i The correspondence of the two kingdoms
of heaven with the heart and lungs, is the
general correspondence of heaven with man ;
but there is a less general one with each of
his members, organs, and viscera; what this
is shall also be mentioned. Those who are
in the head, in the Greatest Man, which is
heaven, are in all good more than the Kest ;
for they are in love, peace, innocence, wis-
dom, intelligence, and thence in joy and
happiness ; these flow into the head and into
those things which are of the head with man,
and correspond to them. Those who are in
the breast, in the Greatest Man, which is
heaven, are in the good of charity and faith,
and they likewise flow into the breast of
man, and correspond to it. But those who
are in the loins, and in the organs devoted
to generation there, in the Greatest Man or
heaven, are in conjugal love. Those who
are in the feet, are in the lowest good of

80 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

heaven, which good is called natural-
spiritual. Those who are in the arms and
hands, are in the power of truth from good.
Those who are in the eyes, are in under,
standing. Those who are in the ears, are in
hearing and obedience. Those who are in
the nostrils, are in perception. Those who
are in the mouth and tongue, are in dis-
coursing from understanding and per-
ception. Those who are in the kidneys, are
in truth which examines, separates and cor-
rects. Those who are in the liver, pancreas,
and spleen, are in the various purification of
good and truth: and so with the rest.
They all flow into the like things of man,
and correspond to them. The influx of
heaven is into the functions and uses of the
members ; and the uses, because they are
from the spiritual world, form themselves
by such things as are in the natural world,
and thus set themselves forth in the effect ;
thence is Correspondence.

" Hence it is that by those same members,
organs, and viscera, in the Word such
things are signified ; for all things there
have signification according to Correspon-
dences. Thus by head is signified intelli-
gence and wisdom; by breast, charity; by

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 81

loins, conjugal love ; by arms and hands, the
power of truth ; by feet, the natural ; by
eyes, understanding ; by nostrils, perception ;
by ears, obedience ; by kidneys, the exam-
ination of truth; and so forth. Hence also
it is that it is usual for a man to say of one
who is intelligent and wise, that he has a
head ; of one who is in charity, that he is a
bosom friend ; of one who is in pereei3tion,
that he has a quick scent; of one who is in
intelligence, that he has a sharp sight ; of one
who is in power, that he has long arms ; of
one who wills from love, that it is from the
heart. These and many other things, which
are in man's speech, are from Correspondence;
for such things are from the spiritual world,
although man is ignorant of it.

" But though all things of man, as to the
body, correspond to all things of heaven,
still man is not an image of heaven as to ex-
ternal form, but as to the internal form, for
the interiors of man receive heaven, and his
exteriors receive the world. As far there-
fore as his interiors receive heaven, so far
man as to them is a heaven in least forim ac-
cording to the image of the greatest; but as
far as his interiors do not receive, so far he is
not a heaven and an image of the greatest:

82 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

yet still the exteriors, which receive the
world, may be in a form according to the
order of the world, and hence in various
beanty. For external beanty, which is of
the body, derives its cause from the parents
and from formation in the womb, and after-
wards is preserved by a common influx from
the world ; hence it is, that the form of the
natural man differs very much from the form
of his spiritual man. Sometimes it has been
shown what the spirit of man was in form,
and it was seen, that in some who were
beautiful and handsome in the face, it was
deformed, black, and monstrous, so that you
would call it an image of hell, not of heaven ;
but in some who were not beautiful, that it
was well formed, fair and angelic. The
spirit of man also appears after death, such
as it had been in the body, when it lived in
the world."*

In explanation of this last paragraph, it
should be borne in mind that there is a
general correspondence of the things of the
body with heaven, and that all things in
order receive a common influx ; whereas the
disorderly things of man's natural mind
correspond with hell, and receive influx

♦Heaven and Hell, n. 87—102,

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 83

thence. While therefore the bodily forms
and functions correspond in general with
the Grand Man, or heaven, and are kept in
life and order thence by common influx ;
they also correspond with the forms and
functions of man's natural mind, which are
in disorder and, before regeneration, in
correspondence with the hells and animated
by influx from evil spirits. In so far, there-
fore, as man's will and thought are evil, he
is in correspondence with evil spirits who
infest, excite and pour in their evil spheres
into his mind; and as hell is the opposite
of heaven, and corresponds to the per-
verted functions of the human form, these
evil spheres tend to infest and disorder the
bodily functions; though it is of divine
order, that corporeal things should be ex-
empt from particular influx. We are told
how the conjunction of heaven with the
world and with the human form is effected
and preserved, and of the way in which
man may by the states of his life co-operate
with common influx through heaven or
disturb it.

"The kingdom of the Lord is a kingdom
of ends which are uses ; or what is the same,
a kingdom of uses which are ends. There-

84 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

fore the universe was so created and formed
by the Divine, that nses may everywhere be
clothed with such things as to be set forth in
act or in effect, in heaven first, and then in
the world; thus by degrees and successively
even to the ultimates of nature. Hence it is
manifest that the correspondence of natural
things with spiritual, or of the world with
heaven, is effected by uses, and that uses
conjoin; and that the forms with which uses
are clothed, are so far Correspondences, and
so far conjunctions, as they are forms of
uses. In the nature of the world, in its
triple kingdom, all things which there exist
according to order, are forms of uses, or
effects formed from use for use ; wherefore the
things which are there, are Correspondences.
With respect to man, as far as he lives ac-
cording to divine order, thus as far as in love
to the Lord and in charity towards the neigh-
bor, so far his acts are uses in form, and are
correspondences, by which he is conjoined to
heaven: to love the Lord and the neighbor
in general is to perform uses. Farther, it is
to be known, that it is man by means of
whom the natural world is conjoined with the
spiritual, or that he is the medium of con-
junction : for in him there is a natural world.

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 85

and also there is a spiritual world; where-
fore as far as man is spiritual, so far he is a
medium of conjunction ; but as far as he is
natural and not spiritual, so far he is not a
medium of conjunction. Still there continues,
without man as a medium, a divine influx
into the world, and also into those things
which are from the world with man, but
not into his rational.

" As all things which are according to
divine order, correspond to heaven, so all
things which are contrary to divine order,
correspond to hell. The things which
correspond to heaven all have relation to
good and truth ; those which correspond to
hell, to evil and the false."*

The spiritual body is in form and qual-
ity like the mind, being inwardly pure and
orderly if the mind be so, and outwardly
beautiful and healthy; while on the other
hand if the mind be evil and disorderly the
spiritual body is inwardly defiled and out-
wardly deformed and diseased. And since
the natural body corresponds with the spiri-
tual body and derives influx from it, with the
adult sufficiently advanced in years it becomes
in quality more or less like the mind. Evils

♦Heaven and Hell, N. 112, 113.

86 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

and falsities, therefore, attract infernal spirits
who induce disorders in the spiritual body,
whence they are derived into the interior
fluids of the natural body, with a continual
tendency to disease. 4 'Every disease incident
to the human race, comes from sin; every
disease also corresponds to its own evil ; be-
cause everything of the life of man comes
from the spiritual world, wherefor if his
spiritual life becomes diseased, evil is also
thence derived into his natural life and be-
comes a disease there."*

"The reason why diseases have correspon-
dence with those who are in the hells is because
diseases correspond to the lusts and passions
of the mind. These are the origins of
disease; for the common origins of disease
are intemperance, luxuries of various kinds,
corporeal pleasures, also envyings, hatreds,
revenges, lasciviousness, and the like, which
destroy a man's interiors, and when these are
destroyed the exteriors suffer and draw him
into disease and death." Thence it is mani-
fest, diseases also have correspondence with
the spiritual world, but with the hells which
are opposite to heaven. All the infernals
induce disease but with a difference, accord-

*Areana Coelestia, n. 8364.

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX, Si

ing to their correspondence with the members,
organs and viscera. "They act from what is
opposite. Heaven, which is the Grand Man,
keeps all things in connection and safety ;
hell as being in the opposite destroys and
rends all things asunder; consequently if the
infernals are applied they induce disease."
They are conjunctively associated with the
mind so far as it is in evil and falsity, and
thence infest the body. "Evil closes the
smallest and altogether invisible vessels, of
which the next greater which are also invis-
ible are composed ; for the smallest and
invisible vessels are continued to a man's in-
teriors. Hence comes the first and inmost
obstruction, and hence the first and inmost
vitiation of the blood ; this when it increases
causes disease, and at length death. If man
had lived the life of good, his interiors would
be open to heaven, and through heaven to
the Lord ; thus also the smallest and invis-
ible vessels would be without disease, and
would only decrease to old age ; and when
the body could no longer minister to his
spirit he would pass without disease out of
his earthly body into a body such as the
angels have, thus out of the world immediate-
ly into heaven."*

*Areana Coelestia, n. 5712, 5726.

88 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

Why are not the bodies of the wicked, it
may be asked, as much denied and deformed
with natural impurity and disease as their
minds with moral and spiritual impurity?
The answer is in the teaching above quoted
concerning the general influx from heaven
into the corresponding externals of the body
providing that the corporeals of man shall
not be controlled by the particular spirits
attendant on him. In the evil the vital fluids
of the body are always more or less defiled,
diseased and infested. "Whatever health or
beauty appertains to them is secured by a
general heavenly influx, from the correspond-
ing parts of heaven, directly into the ex-
teriors of the body.

Evil spirits flow in also by all poisons,
noxious and hurtful things introduced from
nature, for these correspond to evil, and are
produced by correspondence from the hells.
And when disease is induced evil spirits then
flow into the unclean things belonging to the
disease, which correspond to their own evil
loves. Their sphere induces anxiety of mind,
fear, lusts, cravings and passions, by which
again, if not cast off, they defile the vital
fluid.

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 80

It was said above that all things which are
according to divine order correspond to
heaven, and those which are contrary to order
correspond to hell. "Whatsoever is in man ;
whether it be in the external man or the in-
ternal, has correspondence with the Grand
Man. Withont correspondence with the
Grand Man, that is heaven, (or with the
spiritual world, which is in correspondence
with heaven or in the opposite) nothing in
anywise exists or subsists, for the reason that
it has not any connection with what is prior
to itself, thus neither with the first, that is,
with the Lord. What is unconnected, and
thereby independent cannot subsist a single
moment; for the cause of subsistence is con-
nection with and dependence upon that
from which is the all of existence. Hence it
is that not only all and everything belonging
to man corresponds, but also all and every-
thing in the universe."*

The angels in one complex, as a Grand
Man, correspond to the Lord, and thus
infinite things from the Lord flow in accord-
ing to correspondence. These infinite
things become in the angels of heaven in-

* Arcana Coelestia, N. 5377.

90 THE SCIENCE OP CORRESPONDENCE.

definite varieties of affection and thought,
and consequent determinations to use. Ail
these affections and thoughts of the life of
the angels are the causes in and by which
the inflowing divine life creates the objects
of the heavenly world. The phenomenal
world of heaven corresponds in every par-
ticular with the affections and perceptions of
the angels. Land and sky ; gardens, groves,
flowers and fruits ; animals and birds ; habi-
tations, and, in short, all things similar to
those in the natural world, are there; and
all are created from the Lord as a first
cause, through the affections and perceptions
of the angels as efficient causes. Every-
thing in heaven, therefore, is in order from
the Lord and corresponds with the life of
the angels received from the Lord. All
things there stand out around the angels,
and around the angelic societies as produced
or created by them. Those things which
correspond to their permanent states remain
constant; and those which correspond to
varying states come, change and go with the
affections and thoughts through which they
are produced. The universe of heaven thus
corresponds with the affections and percep-
tions of the internal man, and through these

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 91

with the infinite things of the Divine love
and wisdom.

There is with man, however, not only an
internal mind, but an external mind adapting
him to life in the world first and then in
the world of spirits which is below heaven.
When man rises out of the world of spirits
into heaven, the seat of his consciousness is
elevated to his internal mind ; but while it
remains in the external mind he is in the
world of spirits. Now this external mind
corresponds to the internal mind, and thus is
connected with the Lord ; it also creates a
world of things around itself and beholds its
affections and thoughts reflected in corre-
sponding phenomena. These creations of
the world of spirits lie next within the uni-
verse of nature, and are the causes and corre-
spondences of the forces, forms and uses in
nature. It is thus the Lord operates through
heaven and the world of spirits to produce
all things in order from Himself, and to
sustain and keep all things in order, in
heaven, in the world of spirits, and on the
earth respectively. " Nothing is given in
the created world which has not correspond-
ence with something in the spiritual world,
and which does not there in its own manner

&2 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

represent something of the Lord's king-
dom." "The affections of the Lord's love
are infinite, and the perceptions of his wis-
dom are infinite ; and of these all and every-
thing that appears upon the earth are
correspondences." In the spiritual world
there are similar correspondences with those
who receive affections and perceptions from
the Lord ; there instantaneously created
according to the affections of the angels, and
here in like manner at the beginning, but
clothed with the dead matter of the atmos-
pheres and earths, and continued by pro-
creations for the sake of permanence and
re-action. And since all things in order in
the natural world correspond to the affections
and perceptions of the Divine love and wis-
dom, and thus to the creations thence in the
spiritual world through the minds of those
who are there, they also correspond to the
affections and thoughts of man's mind.
Thus the earth in general corresponds to
man as a whole ; its various products which
serve for the nourishment and sustenance of
the human race correspond to the various
kinds of good and truth which nourish the
life of affection and thought. Animals
correspond to affections ; the useful and

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 93

gentle to good affections, and the furious
and hurtful to evil affections. Birds corre-
spond to thoughts ; the good and beautiful to
true thoughts, and birds of night and of prey
to false thoughts. Trees and shrubs and
grasses correspond to different kinds and
degrees of intelligence and knowledge. The
metals, as gold and silver correspond the
one to heavenly good and the other to spiri-
tual truth ; brass, to natural good, and iron
to natural truth ; and common stones to sen-
sual truths, while the precious stones corre-
spond to varieties of spiritual truth.

Now, since the earth and everything on it
corresponds to the Lord and the infinite
things of His love and wisdom, and thus to
heaven and all things there which are corre-
spondences of the affections and perceptions
of love and wisdom, it follows that there is
an influx from the Lord through heaven, sus-
taining and ordering all things for use accord-
ing to the degree and respect in which they
are related to man and through man to the
Lord. And, since on the other hand, they
correspond to the affections and thoughts of
man's life, and thus to the spiritual world
which is the outbirth and correspondent of
his natural mind, it follows that all evil

94 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

affections and thoughts pervert the inflowing
life, and tend to disturb order and to pro-
duce evil and noxious things in nature. In
the hells, and from the hells to some extent
in the world of spirits, appear poisonous
and hurtful animals, as serpents, scorpions,
owls, mice, locusts, frogs, spiders, flies, lice and
various parasites ; also malignant, virulent and
poisonous herbs ; and also poisonous earths.

These are mere correspondences of the cu-
pidities which rush out of their evil loves and
make themselves visible in such forms to
others. The like things in nature flow in
from the hells where there are things that
correspond. Such things do not derive their
origin from the Lord and have not been
created from the beginning, and moreover
have not been created from nature through its
sun. Nature creates nothing; it only receives
and clothes what is spiritual; and the Lord
creates nothing evil, but man by the perver-
sion and evil use of the Lord's creations.
This takes place therefore in the natural mind
of man, when the spiritual mind is closed,
and his natural affections act against the
Divine and pervert all good and truth into
their opposites. The evils and falsities thus
originated in and by man produce their cor-

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 95

respondences in the world around hini ; and
wherever there are excreinentitious, decay-
ing and malarious atmospheres and matters,
they flow in with nature and give rise to the
destructive, noxious and poisonous animal,
vegetable and mineral creations there These
things correspond in general to the hells, and
specifically to those there according to their
specific quality. They are permitted for the
same reason that evils themselves are per-
mitted ; and this is for the sake of man that
he may be in freedom; and being permitted
and existing, they are over-ruled and ordered
to be of use in controlling the evil.

Since all poisonous atmospheres and mat-
ters correspond to the hells there is an influx
from evil spirits into them; and when
they are introduced into the human body the
corresponding spirits infest them, and operate
through the mind in connection with the
body to produce disorder and disease in the
body. .

It follows from all the facts which have
been stated, which are all too meagre to give
much idea of man's spiritual position and
connections as Swedenborg saw it in the
spiritual world, and in the opened Word, that
correspondence and influx in every degree

96 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

and sphere of life is manifold. It is general
and particular; it is mediate and immediate.
The body, for example, corresponds with the
Grand Man and with the Lord, and it corre-
sponds with the spirit within it. It receives
an immediate influx of the divine life causing
it to live and react upon the influx of its own
mind, and upon all other general and par-
ticular forms of spiritual influx. It receives
a general influx through the human form of
heaven conspiring to the integrity of its form
and the health of its functions. At the same
time it receives a mediate influx through
the states of the mind, modifying its order
and functions according to the affections and
thoughts of the man's life. And this me-
diate influx again is two-fold : general through
the spiritual societies in which the man is,
and particular through the particular spirits
associated with him ; and both the general
and the particular influx is two -fold, good
and evil ; for man is connected by his guard-
ian angels and associate spirits with heaven
and hell, in general and particular. With
all these forms of influx, nature co-operates,
because in nature are ultimate correspond-
ences of all things in man both orderly and
disorderly.

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 97

In regard to the main subject of this treat-
ise; therefore, these conclusions follow:

1. That all order and health flow in from
heaven, and all disease and disorder from
hell.

2. That while all things conspire to keep
man in order and health, the action of his
own mind and his consequent spiritual associa-
tions both general and particular, will, so far
as he is in evil and falsity constantly operate
to disturb that order and induce disease into
the body.

3. That since man is connected with the
whole spiritual world, both heaven and hell ;
by his spiritual and natural human form and
its hereditary and actual modifications, his
diseases are no certain index of his particular
spiritual character. But so far as he is in
the endeavour to live spiritually according
to the laws of divine order he is in in-
ternal correspondence with heaven, and all
things conspire to the removal of disease so
far as evils are removed.

The laws of divine order are the laws of
Divine Providence, which is to be conceived
of in accordance with the one grand revela-
tion in all the foregoing ; namely, thatthe Lord
operates in human life, and through the spirit-

98 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

ual world into nature, and not as an arbi-
trary will outside of man and nature. The
Divine Providence of the Lord is infinite and
eternal ; it is general and particular ; it is in
the good and the evil ; and it is, for both, the
evolution of the best possible, by the divinely
best means. It is the government of the
Divine love and wisdom; and these cannot
be separated, for the Divine love is infinitely
wise and the Divine wisdom is infinitely
good. In the Lord are infinite things of*love
and wisdom and use; from Him they pro-
ceed in their own nature and necessity with
infinite endeavor to create receptive forms
and fill them and relate them into one har-
monious recipient and responsive image of
the Lord. This is heaven ; and heaven is a
Grand Man, into whom the Lord's infinite
things may be received, and by whom the
Lord's manhood may be reflected in reciprocal
love, wisdom and uses. This composite man
whom the Lord desires, can only be formed
of individual free men; and its grand har-
mony can only be constituted from their indef-
inite varieties. The Lord, therefore, not only
desires human minds to whom He may give
the blessed things of his divine mind ; but
since He has infinite things to give He desires

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 99

various minds to receive and use them.
Therefore He created, creates and will always
be creating human minds, to be regenerated
differently, to constitute distinct and diverse
recipients and re-agents of the infinite things
of his love and wisdoin, and all by their re-
lations to love and wisdom bearing definite
human relations to each other. Out of this
variety heaven is perfected, and is ever ad-
vancing into a more complete and gloriously
perfect man.

The subject of Divine Providence, there-
fore, is man ; its end salvation, or heavenly
health and happiness for man ; and its means
are those by which man is perfected as to
understanding and will, or the divine truth
and order impressed upon the constitution of
his two-fold nature and the two-fold universe
in which he realizes his life.

As creation and influx is by and in accord-
ance with the correspondence of Natural
things with spiritual, and of spiritual things
with the Divine, so the revelation of divine
truth is given by Correspondence. ' ' That there
might be conjunction of heaven with man,
the Word was written by pure Correspond-
ences ; for all and each of the things which are
there, correspond. And so, if a man were in

100 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

the knowledge of Correspondences, lie would
understand the Word as to its spiritual sense
and it would be given him to know arcana,
concerning which he sees nothing in the sense
of the letter. For in the Word there is a
literal sense, and there is a spiritual sense :
the literal sense consists of such things as are
in the world, but the spiritual sense of such
things as are in heaven ; and because the con-
junction of heaven with the world is by Cor-
respondences, therefore such a Word was
given, that every single thing in it, even to
an iota, corresponds.

" I have been instructed from heaven that
the most ancient men on our earth, who were
celestial men, thought from Correspondences
themselves, and that the natural things of
the world which were before their eyes,
served them as means of so thinking; and
because they were such, that they were con-
sociated with angels and spoke with them ;
and that thus by them heaven was conjoined
to the world. From this, that time was
called the golden age ; of which it is also said
by ancient writers, that the inhabitants of
heaven dwelt with men, and had intercourse
with them as friends with friends. But after
their times those succeeded who thought not

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 101

from Correspondences themselves, but from
the knowledge of Correspondences ; and there
was conjunction of heaven with man also
then, but not so intimate ; their time is what
is called the silver age. Afterwards those
succeeded, who indeed knew Correspondences,
but did not think from the knowledge of
them, because they were in natural good, and
not as the former in spiritual good ; the time
of these was called the copper age. After
their times, man became successively exter-
nal, and at length corporeal, and then the
knowledge of Correspondences was altogether
lost, and with it the conception of heaven
and of most things which are of heaven."*

Thus we learn that primeval men, in the
infancy of the race, had no need of the ex-
ternal verbal forms to guide them into the
apprehension and perception of the truth.
They were simple, open, sincere, aifec-
tionate, and true. The Word which was
with God, and was God flowed into them
as the impulse of divine life, and thus
as a living light. They were capable of
holding communion with God by means of
His love and wisdom "written on their
hearts." They were capable thus of loving

* Heayen and Hell n. 114.

102 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

what He loved, and lived in open perception
of His wisdom. Heaven and earth were
united in man. The earth which the Word
had made in the image of its powers and at-
tributes, and the heaven which the Word
had begotten in man by regeneration, were
in correspondence and harmony, and the
whole phenomenal world was a mirror of
divine intelligence, wisdom, peace/ and love.
They had no need of a written Word; its
light shone within them, and its truths were
reflected in every phenomena of the Word's
creation. They saw the Logos in the Cos-
mos. They needed no other instruction
from without, no authority to coerce, no rea-
sons to persuade ; for to what is good they
had a "yea" implanted in the will, and to
what is evil a "nay." Of course, creation
was to them an open book of symbols, in
which they read mental processes, spiritual
principles, and divine ends, as we read ideas
in words, with scarcely more thought of the
things than we have of the words on the
printed page, from which we seek only the
meaning. Creation itself was the first
Bible. There is such correspondence be-
tween the visible and invisible worlds,
that we all, in our lucid moments, seek to

CORRESPONDENCE AND INFLUX. 103

translate outward phenomena into spiritual
principles and mental processes ; and this
they perceived intuitively from the divine
Spirit which then, in orderly influx, was
communicated from the Lord without the
need of a written Word. Thus the Word ?
the wisdom of God and the light of man,
spoke itself in their hearts and pictured it*
self in the world.

Then they fell away. Some, then others,
and more and more, allowed themselves to
delight in sensuous things for their own sake,
instead of regarding them as the means of
heavenly intelligence and use. Then they
lost their interior perception of the truth.
The transition was something like that from
infancy to childhood, in which the senses as-
sert themselves^ dependence gives place to
self-assertion, intuition gives place to curious
investigation. The transition was gradual,
but it sped on. It involved more and more.
They regarded their wisdom as their own,
and felt themselves gods. They grew spir-
itually stupid, and could not hear the voice
of the Word within.

How shall Grod now instruct men and
make His wisdom known and carry over
the life of his love into their souls? He is

104 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

no further off; there is no break in His two-
fold universe of which man is still an in-
habitant. The Divine Man, the Lord, has
now a heaven of angels, inmostly in each
one of whom He dwells as in a little heaven
and spiritual world. Into each angel he can
flow with the fulness of His wisdom, and
clothing it with a spiritual garment of an-
gelic thought, descend into the ideas of
speech of which nothing is lost. Thus the
Lord as the Word, filling the person of an
angel, may clothe and speak His wisdom in
the language of human ideas ; and then open-
ing the spiritual senses of a man in the
world, dictate His Word to be spoken or re-
corded in the language of the world. Thus
is given the written Word through heaven,
by means of prepared men, but as the
work of God.

THE WRITTEN WORD.

The written Word is as Divine in its
origin as are the things of nature. It is pro-
duced in the same way through heaven from
the Lord. And thus produced the eternal
mind dwells in it and operates by it, as it in-
fills and works in the universe it has made.
There is the same distinction between in-
spired Scripture and merely human com-

THE WRITTEN WORD.

105

position as beween any living creation and
its artificial imitation. There is the continual
influx and presence of a Divine vital force
into the language of the written "Word, an-
alogous to the force of living things in na-
ture ; the indwelling, sustaining and operat-
ing presence of the eternal mind that creates
it. And this is the meaning of that divine
definition of revelation, "The words that I
speak unto you they are spirit and they are
life." Swedenborg says :

" I have been informed how the Lord spoke
with the prophets through whom the Word
was given. He did not speak with them as
with the ancients, by an influx into their in-
teriors, but by spirits who were sent to them,
whom the Lord filled with His presence and
thus inspired words which they dictated to the
prophets; so that it was not influx but dictation.
And because the words came forth immed-
iately from the Lord, they were each filled
with the Divine, and contain within an in-
ternal sense, which is such that the angels
of heaven perceive them in a heavenly and
spiritual sense, when men perceive them in
a natural sense; thus the Lord has conjoined
heaven and the world by the Word."

In Revelation the Divine proceeding from

106 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

God descends through the heavens even to
man. Thus it descends through degrees ce-
lestial, spiritual, and natural ; and when it has
descended it contains these degrees in itself.
The literal sense of holy Scripture is natural;
its interior sense is spiritual; its inmost sense
is celestial; and in each sense it is divine.
These three senses of Holy Scripture make
one by correspondence, like end, cause, and
effect; therefore in the literal sense the
Word is in its fulness, its holiness and its
power. Every natural expression or image
involves a corresponding internal sense.
Thus it is a " ladder of light " with its foot
on the earth and its top in heaven, upon
which the angels of God ascend and descend,
holding men and angels in open communion
with the revealing Word who is over all
and in all.

" There is conjunction with the Lord by
means of the Word, because He is the Word,
that is, the veritable Divine Truth and Good
therein. The conjunction is effected by the
literal sense, because the Word in that sense
is in its fullness, its holiness and its power.
That conjunction is not apparent to man, but
it exists in love of truth, and in the perception
of it. There is consociation with the angels of

THE WRITTEN WORD.

107

heaven by the literal sense, because within it
there is a spiritual and a celestial sense ; and
in these senses the angels are, — the angels of
the Lord's spiritual kingdom m the spiritual
sense of the Word, and those of his celestial
kingdom in its celestial sense. Both these
senses are evolved from the natural sense
while the man who regards the Word as holy,
is reading it. The evolution is instantaneous ;
consequently the consociation is also.'"

"That the spiritual angels are in the spir-
itual sense of the Word, and the celestial
angels in its celestial sense, has been mani
fested to me by much experience. The per-
ception has been given me that when I read
the Word in its literal sense communication
with the heavens was effected, sometimes
with one heavenly society and sometimes
with another : what I understood according
to the natural sense, spiritual angels under-
stood according to the spiritual sense, and
celestial angels according to the celestial
sense, and this instantly. As I have per-
ceived this communication some thousands
of times, there remains with me not the least
doubt about it. . . I have thus been taught by
living experience, that the Word in its lit-
eral sense is the Divine medium of conjunc-

108 THE SCIENCE OP CORRESPONDENCE.

tion with the Lord and consociation with the
angels of heaven."

THE INCARNATE WORD.

As the Word is always creating, producing
new forms of use, and by perpetual influx
into things made, sustaining and relating all
things; so the Word is always revealing,
giving new Scripture as it is needed, in con-
tinual adaptation to changing and unfolding
needs of man, and, by perpetual influx into
the things written, "opening in all the Scrip-
tures the things concerning Himself." And
in the development of this eternal nature and
necessary endeavor of the Word, to recreate
from, sin, and save in life eternal, the " Word
became flesh and dwelt among us, and we
beheld His glory, the glory of the only
begotten of the Father, (the glory of the
Divine wisdom begotten of the Divine love,)
full of grace and truth."

The Lord Jesus Christ is Jehovah God in
His Divine Humanity; the Word, taking on
the human spirit and body which He had
made, that He might bring the Divine truth
into vital and redeeming contact with the
life of man, and impart to him power to be
saved through the truth. Christ was not a
second person in the Godhead, not a man

THE INCARNATE WORD.

109

like ourselves; but the Eternal Word who
was with God and was God from the begin-
ning, who made heaven and earth, inspired
and kept them in being, who revealed Him-
self from the ancient times as the Divine
Man, who put on the human form of an angel
that He might be seen before the spiritual
sight of patriarchs and prophets, now taking
the nature of man upon himself by actual
conception and birth into the world, and
glorifying it by the actual life of the eternal
Mind in it and upon it, to be forever more to
men the very objective revelation of God, to
be the visible object of their faith and
worship, and the medium of the eternal life
which is light to the souls of all men. It
was miracle; but the same old miracle by
which the eternal mind produces and dwells
in the universe, produces a written Eevela-
tion and dwells in it, creates human minds
and dwells with them, orders human history
and testifies His eternal providence by it. It
was only the indwelling mind of God, in its
eternal purpose and meaning, coming out
into realization and revelation. The humanity
of Christ was conceived of the highest ; so is
every spirit of man through the father of him.
This Divine conception immediate and inde-

110 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

pendent of a human father, is no infringement
and reversal of order ; it is simply the old,
eternal order, brought into relation to the de-
veloping needs of men. The Power of the
Highest immediately overshadowing the vir-
gin, the holy thing born of her is in very
fact the only begotten Son of God. Divine
within and human without. The Divine
within is the Father, the human is the Son;
they are one person as soul and body are one
man. Thus the Word brings Redemption.
In taking our nature through the virgin, He
assumes the burdens of our heredity, the
iniquities of us all are made to meet in Him ;
and our connection with Hell through our
hereditary evils, He takes up into His own
life. In His life on earth He brings the
eternal Word in conquering conflict with the
evils of the race ; He is tempted in all points
yet without sin; and "in that He hath
suffered being tempted, He is able to succor
them that are tempted." The Divine Soul
within Him acted by the human nature as
the soul operates by the body; and as the
soul conquers, regenerates and reconciles to
itself the body, so God in Christ reconciles
the world unto Himself, glorifies the human
nature with the Divine, unites it to the

THE INCARNATE WORD. Ill

Divine, as the very Human form of God in
whom " dwells all the fulness of the Godhead
bodily." He is the Visible God ; in Him is
the Invisible; and from Him is the Holy
Spirit of life, light and regenerating power.
This is why His Spirit has power to draw
unto Himself and quicken with Divine life,
even those who know Him not as God,
but draw all their consciousness of the
eternal goodness from its revelation in
Him.

Vindicating the Divine wisdom in the life
of Jesus Christ, the spirit of His redemption
combats and victories enters mightily into
the written Word. He fulfilled it in Him-
self ; and filled full its every word and com-
mandment with the omnipotent virtue of
His own Victory. In and by the Word, His
Divine Human Spirit is mediated to every
soul who will receive it as His Word, and
keep it in faith in Him ; yea, this is why the
Scriptures have power with men, and give
power to a church, which has lost the dog.
matic faith of their inspiration ; the Spirit of
Christ, the Word, enters with them and
quickens through them the mind that will
yield itself to goodness, yea, and " of the re-
bellious also,"

112

THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE.

In concluding this general statement of
doctrine, a summary statement of some of
the laws of Divine Providence is offered.

1. It is a law of Divine Providence that
man should be led and taught by the Lord
from heaven, through the Word and doc-
trine from it, and thus to all appearance as
by himself. He is led by influx according
to the correspondence of his affections and
thoughts with societies in the spiritual world ;
and he is taught by enlightenment accord-
ing to his understanding of the Word and
life in obedience to it. " The affections of
man/ 1 we are taught, a from which his
thoughts proceed, extend into the societies in
the spiritual world in every direction, into
more or fewer of them according to the ex-
tent and quality of his affection. Within
these societies is man as to his spirit, attached
to them as it were, with extended cords cir-
cumscribing the space in which he walks.
As he proceeds from one affection to another,
so he proceeds from one society to another,
and the part of the society in which he is, is
the centre from which issue his affections
and thoughts to all the other societies as cir-
cumferences. Through these societies the

THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 113

man, that is, his mind, although bound, is
led by the Lord ; nor does he take a step in-
to which and from which he is not so led.'"

" Thou hast beset me behind and before,
and laid thine hand upon me.' 1 Yet in all
this divine leading it is provided that man
should not perceive but that he walks in per-
fect liberty. " If his affection is evil he is
taken round through the societies of hell,
and if he does not look to the Lord he is
brought more inwardly and deeply into them;
but still the Lord leads him as it were by
the hand, permitting and withdrawing him
so far as he is willing from freedom to fol-
low. On the other hand, if he looks to
the Lord he is successively led through these
societies, by an order and connection known
only to the Lord, and is brought by con-
tinuous degrees out of hell, upwards toward
heaven, and into heaven. The Lord effects
this without man's knowledge because if he
knew of it he would disturb the continuity
of that progress by leading himself. 1 ' It is
done while man looks to the Lord, learns
truths from the Word, shuns evils revealed,
and wills good and truth into life as of him-
self ; but in all this he is aided by the most
wonderful secret ministry, bending and guid-

114 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

ing his affections as if lie did it of himself.

2. So far as man shuns evils according to
the truths of faith received from the Word,
the Lord enters with His redeeming and
saving Spirit, removes evils and conjoins
man with heaven and with Himself.

If man believed, as is the truth, that all
good and truth are from the Lord, and all
evil and falsity from hell, he would not ap-
propriate good to himself and claim merit,
nor appropriate evil to himself and make
himself guilty of it. He would only reflect
upon the evils within him, and cast them
back from himself to infernal spirits from
whence they come, and this by shunning
them as sins.

3. The internal cannot be cleansed from
the lusts of evil so long as evils in the ex-
ternal man are not removed.

4. The evils in the external man cannot
be removed except by means of the man ;
that is with his consent and effort as of him-
self.

5. Therefore evils are permitted that they
may be seen, and that man may repent of
and resist them.

6. So far as man shuns evils in the ex-
ternal thought and life, the Lord removes the

THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 115

internal desire and also the evil from the
life.

7. Thus the Lord acts from His Divine in
the inmost, and from His Divine truth in ex-
ternal and outmost things of man's life, with
man's consent and co-operation, to heal, order
and regenerate all intermediate things.

8. And since the Lord is order itself , all
things from first to last are reformed and re-
generated with respect to all other things for
the sake of eternal life in heaven.

«< THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE ' v EXAMINED.

The purpose of this essay is expository
not controversal. But, as said at the begin-
ning, the name of Swedenborgis often connect-
ed with metaphysical theories to which he
gives no sort of countenance ; and his doc-
trines are sometimes associated with foreign
speculations in such a way as to mislead even
those who are fairly well instructed in them.

In Dr. Holcombe's " Condensed thoughts
about Christian Science," this confusion exists
throughout ; and the wide circulation of the
pamphlet, the reputation of the writer and
general impression that he is presenting the
teachings of Swedenborg, whose name he
freely uses, would seem to make an exami-
nation of it in the light of the foregoing
doctrine an act of justice, as well as a useful
means of applying the doctrine to the subject
discussed.

The Doctor says in his preface :

" The psychology of Swedenborg will solve many enigmas
for the Christian Scientist, and save him from many errors
and extravagances. »

116

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 117

*' It will teach him the difference between God and man f
and between man and nature; and also the difference
between the real and the apparent, and that between the
apparent or unreal and the non-existent.

14 It will teach him the correspondences between the Spirit
and matter, and the true reason why we can say that
matter has no properties, no sensations, no independent
existence."

This is true ; but lie had just said, u the
idealism upon which Christian Science is based
can be immensely re-inforced by the spiritual
philosophy of Swedenborg," which is not in
the least true, as that idealism is represented
by the Doctor in his subsequent pages.
There is a philosophic idealism deducible
from Swedenborg's writings, but there is in
it no confusion of the Divine Spirit with the
spirit of man, nor any confounding of the
degrees of life, nor any denial of the reality
of the phenomenal world of the senses, such
as obtains throughout these pages, and be-
longs to the theories of Christian Science in
general. And it will be seen that the very
absence in Swedenborgof "the idealism upon
which Christian Science is based," and the
definiteness and reality of his distinctions
between the Divine and the human, and
between good and evil in the human mind
and from the human mind in both worlds, is
the only justification of the promise that his

118 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

psychology will teach the scientist " the dif-
ference between God and man, and between
man and nature : also the difference between
the real and the apparent, and between the
apparent or unreal and the non-existent."

The Doctor very properly begins with a
"Statement of Being/' and holds that the idea
of God is always the beginning, and that it is
necessary to " return to first principles, the
absolute truth about God, and from that truth
as a divine centre, to re-construct and re -state
all our knowledge."

11 No system or science can ever be true unless it starts
from God as a centre; and a false idea of God will vitiate
the whole. There is one God: even Jesus Christ. He is
manifested by Life, Love, Goodness, Wisdom and Power. *
* * * There is no space, or time, state or condition, spiri-
tual or natural, in the universe, where this life of God
with its attributes, Love, Goodness and Wisdom does not
exist. This diyine life, or essential being, expresses itself
by Power, Order, Law, Intelligence, Use, Harmony, Beauty,
Peace, Health and Happiness. The divine life is omnip-
resent, omniscient and omnipotent; to which nothing can
be added; from which nothing can be abstracted. It
creates nothing opposite or contrary to itself. It creates
everything in its own image and likeness. All things from
the atom to the Man, reflect their Creator. * * These are
absolute truths; true everywhere and always." — Page 10.

This is true as far as it goes, though some-
what vague in its terms, especially when
taken in connection with a warning given in
the preface, and with its elaboration in sub-

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 119

sequent pages. " There is one God : even
Jesus Christ," is the doctrine of the New-
Church uniformly and consistently adhered
to without modification or reservation by
Swedenborg. He is Jehovah God in His
Divine Humanity. He is not to be thought
of as a Divine, all -pervading, invisible spirit
of intelligence and power or other abstrac-
tions ; but as the Divine Man, in whom is love
and wisdom itself and from whom love
and wisdom proceed ; first as the sun of
heaven, and thence as spiritual heat and light
which are received as love and wisdom in the
created wills and understandings of angels
and men. The Lord from Eternity, who 5s
Man, descended and assumed a human
organic form in all its degrees, by birth of a
virgin; and this also he glorified in all its
degrees by putting off what was finite and in-
firm and putting on the Divine in the same de-
gree, even to the corporeal or bodily degree
which man leaves in the world, and rose with
His whole body a Divine Substantial Human
Form; from which is the Holy Spirit, which
is the all of life, form, force and order in
heaven and on earth. This is the doctrine
of the New Church which Swedenborg ex-
pounds, explains, definitely and with many

120 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

warnings to think spiritually and not mater-
ially, that is, from the Divine Human
character and essence, and not from space and
time, but without for a moment losing sight of
the idea of a Man, and of the Human Form
as the beginning and end of the thought of
God. And the Lord Jesus Christ is He;
there is no God out of Him ; or apart from
Him ; His Glorified Humanity is the visible
God in whom is the Invisible. It seems only
a confounding and confusion of counsel, to a
mind trained in this doctrine, to read the fol-
lowing :

"We must lose sight entirely of the historical person
age — the Son of Man, and rise to the contemplation of the
sublime fact, that Jesus Christ united to the Father is the
divine humanity of the universe— the manifested Divine
Truth — which includes all truths as the sea does its waves,
which is no respector of persons or forms, and which can-
not be limited to any ecclesiastical channel whatever. It
is best, perhaps, to call him God— for he is God — and
because He is God — He is also Jehovah and Buddha, and
Allah, and the Great Spirit, and the Supreme Being, and
every other name whereby man in his feebleness has strug-
gled to express his perfections." — Page 5.

If this means anything it is a confounding
of the Humanity of God with the humanity
of the universe, and of the Divine which
proceeds from God- Man with the concepts
to which it gives rise in the minds of men.
With this vague conception of the " One

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 121

God, even Jesus Christ/' one does not know
how much truth may Be intended, or what
idea it may yield the reader. The Doctor's
"Statement of Being" may however be con-
strued in agreement with the following from
Swedenborg, the meaning of which cannot
well be mistaken: "There is an only essence,
an only substance and an only form, from
which are all the essences, substances and
forms that have been created. That one only
essence, substance and form, is the Divine
Love and Wisdom, from which are all things
that have relation to love and wisdom. It is
also Good itself and Truth itself, to which
all things have relation. And those are the
life from which are the life of all things and
all things of life. Also that the Only, from
which all else is, and the Itself, which alone is,
is Omnipresent, Omniscient and Omnipotent.
And this Only and Itself is the Lord from
Eternity, or Jehovah." * In explanation of
this last proposition, Swedenborg says, "God
is One in essence and in person, and this God
is the Lord ; the Divine Itself, which is called
Jehovah the Father, is the Lord from eter-
nity ; the Divine Human is the Son conceived
from His Divine from eternity, and born in

♦Divine Providence, n. 157.

122 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

the world ; and that the proceeding Divine is
the Holy Spirit." It is the Lord from eternity
from whom are all essences, substances and
forms, and it is the Divine proceeding or the
Holy Spirit by which they are created, sus-
tained, animated and actuated.

This " Statement of Being," however, does
not explain the existence of evil, sin, suffering
and sorrow, or anything contrary to the Lord
from whom all things proceed. The Doctor
however assumes that it does, and proceeds
to rule out such things.

" Nothing of what we call evil, sin, suffering, sorrow and
death can possibly have any source or causation in the
divine life or any of its attributes, and there is no other
origin for any real thing. They have, therefore no real
independent existence. They are not negations of the
Divine life, for that life is everywhere present and admits
no negation. They are not perversions of the Divine life,
for that life is infinitely perfect, and cannot be perverted.
They are not living, real things at all, but false interpre-
tations of the divine life, the creations of human fancy,
the morbid products of the imagination — fantasies, shad-
ows, dreams, nightmares, images, which seem to have life
and power but have none. They produce on us all kinds of
sensations as if they were real, but the sensations have no
more real foundation than the sensations we experience in
dreams." — Page 11.

Because evil cannot originate in the only
good and true, which are in the Lord and
from the Lord, therefore he concludes they
are not ; they are not negations, they are not

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 123

perversions of the Divine life, therefore they
are nothing. What is meant by the phrase
"no real independent existence, 1 ' does not
appear; independent of what? He has not
yet shown how anything exists independent
of the only life, not even man with an indi-
viduality and consciousness of his own. If
there is one only " life, love, goodness, wis-
dom, power," how does it operate, how man-
ifest itself, and to whom ? What receives it,
and whence and how does that recipient ex-
ist? Just here is the key to the psychology of
the New Church, and to the confusion of
Doctor Holcombe's "Thoughts. 1 " Swedenborg
answers these questions in the Doctrine of the
Divine Proceeding, and of created forms ; the
Doctor does not answer them, nor does he
keep Swedenborg' s answer clearly in mind,
but more often the "idealism on which Chris-
tian Science is based."

Every man is a thought of God — a form of the Divine
Truth, born of the Father or the Divine Love, and des-
tined by appointed ways to work out and ultimate the
divine purposes. This is the true doctrine of predestin-
ation and of immortality, Truth is God thinking in us.
Goodness is God feeling in us. All our movements
from goodness and truth are God working through us.
And yet we are not God — nor is this pantheism. It is
the Christian's union with God. " That they all may be
one : as thou, Father art in me and I in thee ;that they may
also be one in us — I in them and thou in me"— Page 12.

124 THE SCIENCE OP CORRESPONDENCE.

A " thought of God " in God, is intel-
ligible if He be conceived of as a Divine
Man, a loving, thinking, acting person ; but
a " thought of God" out of God is a pure
abstraction unless there be a recipient form.
u A form of the Divine truth, v — what Divine
truth ? Divine truth in God, or proceeding
out of Him ? How formed, in the Divine
Mind, or by the operation of the Divine
Mind upon what has proceeded forth from
itself ? If the "thought of God" which man
is, is God's thought in Himself, then every man
is a part of God and all men are God ; and this
is pantheism in spite of all denial. The
Doctor must know, when he stops to con-
sider, that Swedenborg's doctrine of the
Divine Proceeding and the existence of at-
mospheres and substances thence, and the
creation of forms from those substances as
the recipients of the Divine life, is the only
conception which can avert the conclusion of
pantheism ; and that this doctrine being un-
known to his readers, his very definition of
man could only serve to call up the Christian
Scientists' circle of reasoning: man is a
thought of God ; God is a spirit, therefore
man is a spirit ; to be in the spirit is to be in
God ; to think God's thoughts is to be God.

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 125

Now let us turn to Swedenborg. Re-
verting to the genera] doctrine, it will be re-
membered, he teaches that the first proceed-
ing from the Lord, who is the Itself and the
Only, is the sun of the spiritual world, which
is pure love from Jehovah God in the midst
of it. It may be well here to state in sum-
mary the order of creation from that sun.
Let it be remembered that this is the order
in which the " One only essence, substance
and form," who is the Lord from eternity,
" produces from Himself all the essences,
substances and forms that have been created."
They were not created out of nothing, bufc
from His only essence, substance and form;
they are not in Him, but produced forth from
Himself by orderly derivations according to
degrees, as already explained.

1. God is Man; and from Him proceeded
and proceeds the sun of the spiritual world,
which is the first sphere of His Divine love
and wisdom; spiritual fire and light eman-
ating from Him, in the midst of which He
is, and by which He creates and sustains all
things.

2. From the spiritual sun He produces
spiritual atmospheres of several distinct de-
grees. These atmospheres, at first most pure,

126 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

fine, fiery and active, as they recede from that
sun and become gradually coarser by con-
cretion and compounding, and so cooler and
less active; become at length substances at
rest, capable of re-action and thus of becoming
formed and actuated. Thus was the sub-
stantial spiritual world produced; and by
influx of the Lord's life of love and wisdom
from that sun through those graded atmos-
pheres it is continually sustained. All this
in the spiritual world.

3. From the Divine love and wisdom, or
Divine heat and light of the spiritual sun,
were cheated the natural suns, our sun and
the fixed stars, which are the first created
centers of natural worlds; and from each nat-
ural sun, is produced natural atmospheres
around it, first the finest, hottest, most active;
then as they pass off into the distance from
the sun, they become more compounded,
cooler and less active, and finally substances
at rest, thus water and then earths.

Here, then, is a universe created by the
Lord as a Man; a universe that is two-fold,
spiritual and natural, the spiritual within the
natural and connected with it, as the soul is
within and connected with the body ; and it
is continually sustained and conserved by

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 127

Him, flowing in with His life from its first,
highest and inmost beginnings through
the spiritual world as a soul, into the nat-
ural world as a body. In this two-fold uni-
verse, internal and external, active and
passive, the one is within the other, as the
essential within the formal, the operative
within the instrument. And the universe is
two -fold because the spiritual sun is so ;
and it is so because the Lord from whom it
emanates is so ; that is, active love and re-
active wisdom.

There is humanity inhering in this uni-
verse, therefore, from the essential humanity
of the God -man who creates and sustains it;
and every possibility of human form and use,
and every spiritual and natural form and
function corresponding to human life and
need in this world and the other, were in-
volved in the proceeding of creative life
through the other world into this. That is,
Divine life in its creative outflow to ult-
mates in the world, involved in their initia-
ment and held in potentiality all forms to be
developed, when the basis and re-action should
be reached in the earths.

4. Given such a two -fold universe, with
the spiritual world as its active soul and the

128 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

natural world as its re-active body, and God
in the inmost as the intelligent producer and
mover of all ; then life flows in from God
through the sun of the spiritual world in-
to the natural sun, and by its atmospheres
to the earths carrying the spiritual impulse
and endeavor to form its substances into
"rock-ribbed" foundations, and overlay them
with mould and earths, and to form these
substances into cells or eggs for the reception
of vegetative seeds. In the spiritual world
at the same time, are produced the active
spiritual forms with an impulse to clothe
themselves with material forms. Thus the
first productions of the material world while
it was still recent and in its virgin state, were
seeds ; the first endeavor could be no other.
There is, in the mineral kingdom, a constant
tendency to vegetate ; that is, it receives from
the common influx of the spiritual world
through the sun's atmospheres an impulse
and motion disposing its substances into re-
cepticals, into which the vegetative soul or
seed from the spiritual world may flow. To-
wards this result, however, the heat and light
and atmospheres of the natural world con-
tribute nothing except to clothe the heat and
light of the spiritual world, and supply the

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 129

material to make it visible, useful and fixed
in the natural world. Beginning thus, in the
mineral kingdom, and in the simplest forms,
and proceeding by successive modifications
of forms and their vivification from the spir-
itual world, existences came forth succes-
sively through the three kingdoms of nature,
each in effort to prepare for, and to supply
forms to receive and bring forth the higher.
But the only part that nature can play in the
production of these ascending existences is to
supply matter, and thus receptive forms, for
the active spiritual seed and soul that flows
in from the spiritual world. In the whole
chain of existence not a mineral crystalizes,
or a seed forms, or a plant grows or an
animal is born, or a man lives and becomes
regenerate, except by spiritual influx from the
spiritual world adapted to produce that re-
sult ; and such influx proceeds each and every
moment, in every case, whether to produce
or to sustain, by continual mediations from
the love and wisdom of God. And when
thus the kingdoms of nature were developed,
and the corresponding kingdoms of the spir-
itual world, the Lord operating through both
worlds produced man as the end involved,
and the crown and consummation in the

130 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

whole divine chain of development*

Swedenborg's definition of man ; as a
substantial organic form recipient of the
life of love and wisdom ought now to be in-
telligible. He is "a thought of God," indeed ;
but not a ''projection into nothing 1 ' as would
be the case if he were not by created forms
separated from the Creator in order that he
may be a personal existence. As was shown
in the general doctrine, "life must have an
organism to operate a function; and the
organism must be two -fold, spiritual to
receive life, and, at first, material to give per-
manence to spiritual forms, and react upon
the inflowing life." It was shown that this
necessity calls for two suns, a living and a
dead, and two worlds ; and without birth into
this world, spiritual organic forms, such as are
the will and understanding of man, could not
be given and developed.

Now consider in this connection the follow-
ing : "That the Lord has created man, and
afterwards forms with him, a receptacle of
love which is his will, and adjoins to it a
receptacle of wisdom, which is his under-
standing. That these forms, which are the

•$ee Dr. Burnham in N. C. Messenger, Vol. 27, pp. 291, 303.

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 131

receptacles of love and wisdom first exist
with man at his conception and birth. That
from those forms by a continuous principle
are brought forth and produced all things of
the body from the head even to the soles of
the feet. That those productions are effected
according to the laws of correspondence, and
that therefore all things of the body, both
internal and external are correspondences."
<k That no angel or spirit is given nor can be
given who had not been born a man in the
world.*"* Moreover this spiritual organic
form, which man is, is a series of forms in
discrete degrees. There is an internal mind
with its two receptacles, the will and under-
standing ; an external mind, corresponding
to the internal, with its will and understand-
ing ; a spiritual body with its brains and its
heart and lungs, corresponding to the will
and understanding ; and a physical body cor-
responding to the spiritual body and to the
minds within it.

This is somewhat more specific and think-
able than the metaphysical abstraction sug-
gested by the Doctor's phrase, "A thought of
God." Swedenborg teaches everywhere, that
"the will and the understanding is not any

•Divine Wisdom in Apoc.Exp. IT. ^nd Yin.

132 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

spiritual abstract principle, but a subject sub-
stantiated and formed for the reception of
love or wisdom." 44 Man's soul, which lives
after death, is his spirit, and is in complete
form a man ; the soul of this form is the will
and understanding; and the soul of these is
love and wisdom from the Lord; these two
constitute man's life from the Lord alone, yet
in order to man's acceptance of Him He
causes life to appear as if it were man's
own." * This appearance can be given, and
thence rationality and freedom, because man
as a created form has an inmost entrance and
dwelling place of the Divine life, an internal
will and understanding corresponding to the
love and wisdom of the Lord, an external
will and understanding corresponding to the
internal, and a spiritual and natural body
corresponding to the will and understanding.

How real these organic receptacles are, may
be conceived in that they are "substantiated
and formed," and that the mental processes
of which we are conscious are defined, not in
the least as abstractions, but as mutations of
actual spiritual substances and forms. "The
changes of their state are affections, the var-
iations of their form are thoughts, the existence

♦Divine Love ana Wisdom, n. 394,

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAK SCIENCE. 133

and permanence of the latter and the former is
memory, and their reproduction is recollection;
all taken together are the human mind."*

All life is the Lord's and from Him alone ;
but man is not the Lord, nor his affec-
tion and thought the Lord's love and
wisdom; because he is a created recep-
tacle of them, and life as received by him on
any plane of his faculties becomes what the
form is. Life is brought down into and
through the discrete degrees of his mind by-
correspondence. Because the higher will
and understanding correspond to Divine love
and wisdom they receive it and bring it down
as affection and thought to the lower will
and understanding. The correspondence by
organic form of the brain with the will and
understanding brings these down as inhab-
itants into the brain as their temporal
home; the correspondence of the heart and
lungs, by form again, with the will and un-
derstanding, brings them into commerce of
motion with the body; and the human spirit
from within by correspondence with the cor-
poreal human form makes the man a citizen
of the natural world.f

Any approach to a confounding of the

•Divine Wisdom, Apoc. Exp. V.

fSee Wilkinson's Greater Organs and Issues, etc., p 278.

134 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

Divine life which is " All in all," with any
or all things which it has created, such as
may be traced on almost every page of the
Doctor's pamphlet, may be set down as one
of the "errors" not u repudiated " by him.
God, spirit and matter are not to be con-
founded : (a) God is life, substance and form
in Himself; (£) spirit is created substance
and form, receptive of life; and (c) matter is
created substance and form, in itself dead
and reactive to life.

In like manner God, man and nature are
distinct: (a) God alone is the creator of re-
cipient forms and the giver of life ; (b) man
is created a spiritual, substantial form, co-
ordinate with the spiritual world, clothed
upon with a dead, passive and re- active body
co-ordinate with the material world; (c) life
from God flows immediately into man's organic
will and understanding, imparting and main-
taining power to love and think and do, and
also mediately through the spiritual world
according to the quality of his love and
thought and deed; thus (d) man lives by
immediate influx from God but by mediate
influx through associate angels and spirits,
and by the reaction of the natural world, he
lives in freedom and rationality.

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 135

This action and re -action takes place in the
natural or external mind, which is therefore
the recipient of two opposite influences:
heaven with its love and wisdom flowing in
by the spiritual mind ; and the natural world
with its conditions and appearances perceived
in the plane of the senses. These two influ-
ences acting and re -acting upon one another
serve to keep man in a state of equilibrium,
or of freedom of determination and action.
So far as the natural mind re -acts upon the
influx from the spiritual mind it is in a state
of correspondence ; and is capable of develop-
ment in the direction of the acting force, or
the inflowing Divine love and wisdom. But
so far as it re-acts against the spiritual mind
the spiritual is closed and the natural mind
develops in the direction of the acting force
from below, or the affections and persuasions
of the senses. The natural mind as a re-
cipient form is thus capable of acting in cor-
respondence with the spiritual mind, by which
the one only life, love and wisdom flow in,
or of acting in opposition to that influx ; in
which case the recipient form is not destroyed
but perverted into its opposite. In this
equilibrium and consequent freedom of
willing and thinking is at once the condition

136 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

or angelic development and the possibility of
evil creations. It is a balance which the
Lord continually maintains and a freedom
which He continually imparts ; because it is
essential to individual and conscious manhood
or angelhood; and in the right or wrong use
of it are the issues of good and evil.

Swedenborg teaches, that, "Man was cre-
ated to love himself and the world, his neigh-
bor and heaven, and also the Lord. Hence
it is that when he is born he first loves
himself and the world, then his neighbor
and heaven, and afterwards in proportion
as he grows in wisdom, the Lord ; when this
is the case he is in reality led by the Lord
though he is apparently guided by himself.
In proportion, however, as he is unwise, he
stops short in the first degree, which is that
of loving himself and the world ; and if he
loves his neighbor, it is for the sake of him-
self in the eyes of the world. But if he is
altogether void of wisdom, he then loves him-
self alone, or the world and his neighbor for
the sake of himself; and with respect to
heaven and the Lord ; he thinks slightingly
of them, or denies them, or even hates them
in his heart, if he does not do so openly iu
words. These are sources of self-love and the

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 137

love of the world, and because these loves
(out of subordination to the higher) are hell,
the origin of hell is evident. When man has
become a hell, the interior or higher princi-
ples of his mind are closed, but the exterior
and lower are open ; and because self-love
directs everything of thought and will to it-
self, immersing them in the body, it therefore
inverts and forces back the exteriors of his
mind, which, as was observed, are open, and
the consequence is that they have an incli-
nation and tendency downwards, and are
borne away to hell. But because he retains,
notwithstanding, the faculty of thinking, of
willing, of speaking and of acting — a faculty
which is in no case taken from him, because
he is born a man — and is, at the same time,
in this inverted state, receiving no longer any
good or truth whatever from heaven, but
rather what is evil and false from hell, he
therefore procures for himself a kind of light,
by confirmations of evil based in falsity, and
of falsity based in evil, in order that he may
still be eminent above others. He imagines
that this is a rational light, though it is from
hell, and in reality full of foolish delusion,
producing a vision like that of a dream in the

138 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

night, or a craziness of imagination, from
which things that are appear as if they were
not, and things that are not, as if they were."" *
Here then is a rational account of man's
life from the one only life, also of the free-
dom whereby he perverts it into a real evil
and continuing life of delusion and insanity.
He has life from the only life, because he has
been created and formed that he may be a re-
ceptacle of it. He receives the Divine love into
his will, and the Divine wisdom into his un-
derstanding ; and this in such a way by the
very constitution of these receptacles that the
love and wisdom appear to be his own, and
he to act as of himself as the Lord does act
of Himself. Whence it follows that he de-
termines the inflowing life in freedom of will
according to his thought ; and that the re-
cipient forms, or the will and understanding
become conformed to the use he makes of the
inflowing life. By virtue of the understand-
ing he is an image oi God, and by virtue of
the will a likeness of God ; and because these
receptacles are from creation, and formed
with every one in the womb, and are inde-
structible, when they are closed above and
opened below, man is still an image and like-
ness but an inverted one, and his life a per-

♦Athanasian Creed, n. 43.

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 139

verted one. He is still a recipient of Divine
life; it flows in by the unconscious inmost
soul, and the closed internal mind. But
when it reaches his conscious will it is turned
into its opposite corresponding love and in
his understanding perverts every known
truth into a corresponding falsity. Of such
is hell. These evils and falsities pressing into
nature originate every evil form, disorderly
force, and injurious combination known to
nature. Evil, therefore, in man and in the
spiritual world and in nature, is not the
"negation of the one only life," but the per-
version of created recipient forms into corre-
sponding opposites.

The Doctor says " there are two factors in
the production of phenomena — God's will
and man's will"; and proceeds to explain as
follows :

" When we desire a selfhood and to possess things with a
supreme ownership, we try to separate ourselves from God
and lead an independent life. But we cannot do it. We pro-
duce merely a vast tissue of self -deceptions. The first step in
this self-deception of the race is the creation of the devil — the
father of lies — who abides not in the truth. In this effort after
a sense of independence and ownership, we externalize our
thoughts and so pervert our affections and falsify our under-
standings ; and thus weave a fantastic, unreal thread into our
whole web of being. We are then cast out of the spiritual
garden of Eden, and generate by our own thinking a change in
our material environment, to which we give false interpre-
tations innumerable." — Page 13.

140 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

Now it will be seen from the foregoing
exposition of the doctrine of recipient f orms ;
that this is an inadequate account of both the
process and the effect of man's desire to " lead
an independent life." It is the more mis-
leading because it is partially true so far as
it goes, but is neither wholly true nor the
whole truth. What that desire did in the
origin of evil was to close the will and under,
standing above and open them below] and
since affections and thoughts are changes in
the state and form of the spiritual substances
of the mind, this was an inversion and per-
version of the receptacles " substantiated and
formed" with man. The result, which the
Doctor calls " a vast tissue of self-deceptions,"
was indeed wrought into the spiritual tissue
of the mind itself; wherefore it became or-
ganic, and transmissible as a perverted organ-
ism by the laws of heredity. It did not in
deed "produce a new life different from
God's life," for man can produce no life, good
or evil; but it did produce something more
than "a dream," an inversion in the sub-
stantial organism of the mind, a perversion of
functions, turning of the good of life into its
opposites, and thus an inflowing good into a
real and continuing evil. Any jugglery with

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 141

the words "real" and "unreal" is folly here.
Since man is nothing but a recipient form, a
perversion of the form is organized and sub-
stantiated ; and it is a real perversion in every
customary sense of the word, that is a sub-
stantial and organic fact however disorderly;
and because he is still a recipient form,
though perverted and disordered, the life re-
ceived and qualified by that form, is a real
life though insane and evil. And moreover
this evil condition existing is not to be es-
caped by any denial of it, but by " re -form-
ation;" that is by actually living the recep-
tacles of the will and understanding back into
their true form and order by obedience to the
truth of God, or the Word brought down to
man's apprehension. Evil is so real that
there is no escape from it, except by real re-
generation, by " shunning evil as sin against
God," and "combatting it as from hell" which
is the inversion and opposite of heaven.
There is an unreality and phantasy pertain-
ing to every perverted will and understand-
ing; but the perversion of the receptacles,
which is the origin and determining cause of
these insanities, is most real. "A real thing,"
says the Doctor, " has a definite projection or
objectivity, dependent upon some underlying

142 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

cause, in harmony with the Divine laws of
creation and manifestation. 1 ' Precisely that
evil and disease are; and their existence,
manifestation, control, subordination and re-
moval, are dependent upon the " divine laws
of permission which are also laws of divine
Providence."

The fifth u Error " to be repudiated, upon
the repudiation of which the whole scheme of
Christian Science rests, is not an error ac-
cording to Swedenborg. The Doctor states
it thus :

5th Error. — That evil, sin, suffering and sickness are real
things, genuine entities and existences, involving the whole
world in mental and physical conditions of disorder and
wretchedness; and to be resisted and combatted by all the
means, internal and external, which we can command, and
not to be destroyed, as Christ demonstrated, by the word of
truth."— Page SO.

The only way in which Christ " destroyed"
evil, sin, suffering, and sickness by the u Word
of truth " was through man's co-operation, in
the acknowledgment of them and in re-
pentance and faith by obedience. Such is
the teaching of Swedenborg throughout.
He says:

" He who would be saved must confess his
sins, and do the work of repentance. To con-
fess sins, is to know evils, to see them in our-

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 143

selves, to acknowledge them, to make our-
selves guilty, and to condemn ourselves on
account of them. This, when it is done be-
fore God, is the confession of sins.

" To do the work of repentance, is to desist
from sins after a man has thus confessed them,
and from an humble heart has made suppli-
cation for remission, and to live a new life ac-
cording to the precepts of charity and faith.
He who only acknowledges generally that he
is a sinner, and makes himself guilty of all
evils, and yet does not explore himself, that
is, see his own evils, makes confession indeed,
but not the confession of repentance ; he, for-
asmuch as he does not know his own evils,
lives afterwards as he did before. He who
lives the life of charity and faith does the
work of repentance daily ; he reflects upon
the evils which are with him, he acknowl-
edges them, he guards against them, he sup-
plicates the Lord for help. For man of
himself continually lapses towards evil, but
he is continually raised by the Lord, and led
to good. Such is the state of those who are
in good ; but they who are in evil lapse con-
tinually, and are also continually elevated by
the Lord, but are only withdrawn from falling
into the most grievous evils, to which of

144

THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

themselves they tend with all their power.
The man who explores himself in order to do
the work of repentance, must explore his
thoughts and the intentions of his will, and
must there examine what he would do if it
were permitted him, that is, if he were not
afraid of the laws, and of the loss of repu-
tation, honor and gain. There the evils of
man reside, and the evils which he does in
the body are all from thence."*

Moreover he teaches that " no one can
shun evils as sins, so as inwardly to hold
them in aversion, except by combats against
them."

We come most completely under the
sphere of evil spirits when we deny their ex-
sitence, for they can then flow into and ex-
cite our disorderly mental forms in such way
as to make evil seem good. The enjoyments
of hereditary evils allure the thoughts and
banish reflection , wherefore, if man did not
know from some other source that they are
evils he would call them goods, and from
freedom according to the reason of his
thought he would commit them ; when he
does this he appropriates them to himself.
To deny the reality of evils in the thought

• Heavenly Doctrine Nos. 159-164.

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 145

without acknowledging their source in hell
and from evil spirits, is not to shun or re-
move them, but to close the eye of the mind
to them while cherishing the unacknowl-
edged inward love from which they flow
forth. But to acknowledge evils and falsities
in one's self as flowing in from hell and
through the agency of evil spirits, to repu-
diate them as contrary to the Word, to re-
ject them to hell from which they proceed,
to refuse them volition and act because they
are wrong, and combat them as of one's self
in the name of the Lord, — this is to remove
evils in the external man and open the door
for the Lord to come in and remove the lusts
of evil in the internal, and dispose the evil
spirits and their inciting sphere. This is to
deny, not the reality of evil, but the reality
of its pleaded rights and powers. And this
denial takes place in the thought, from the
will to shun evil and live according to the
Lord's Word. Evil spirits rejoice and exult
when they can induce man to deny the devil
and the reality of evil, for then they can
work where they love to work, in the dark ;
and flowing from the dark into man's heredi-
tary love, lead him where they will. But
if man, when any evil is presented in

146 THE SCIENCE OP CORRESPONDENCE,

thought, will say, "I see this and know that it
flows in from evil spirits into the inclinations
of my self-love, but because it is contrary to
the Lord's Word I will not do it," then the
evil spirits are compelled to withdraw ; the
truth adopted as a principle of action is appro-
priated ; the will of good is internally strength-
ened; and an advance in spiritual life is
achieved.

This is in brief the doctrine of life for the
New Jerusalem. And it is based upon the
doctrine of Redemption, which is, that the
Lord took our nature upon Him, with its
hereditary evil, or disordered recipient forms,
that in it His love and wisdom might be as-
saulted by evil spirits, and by combats against
them subjugate them to the Divine Truth and
keep them in subjection to eternity. He did
more than take on "all the functions of our
externalized human nature," more than to
" enter upon our false and terrible dream,"
whatever the Doctor may mean by these
vague expressions. He actually took our
nature, all of it, with its hereditary pervert-
ed forms, so far as they could be assumed
through the mother without a human father ;
" He was tempted in all points in which we
are; yet without sin," for He did not "enter

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 147

upon our false and terrible dream," but drove
back the assaulting spirits by the assertion of
the Divine Truth against them and the oper-
ation of its power upon them ; thus suffering
their assaults without accepting their evils
and fantasies, and reducing them to the lim-
itations of order in hell; and thus, without
denying their reality, destroying their power
over man.

At the same time, and by the same com-
bats with evil spirits and victories over them,
he " put off every thing derived from the
mother," and put on the Divine Human even
to ultimates, making His very body Divine
Good and Truth, the very form of the Invis-
ible God and "the power of God unto salva-
tion," to all who will approach Him immedi-
ately and assert the commandments of His
Word against evil in His name. His re-
deeming work was not, and is not any imag-
inary and idealistic dispersion of " race-errors
and race -illusions," but an actual conflict
with evil spirits who were and are the em-
bodiment of those errors and illusions, and
the victorious assertion of His Divine truth
against them, whereby they were reduced to
order within the limitations which the Lord
in mercy and wisdom allows them in hell.

148 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

"The Divine Nature is not susceptible of
evil; wherefore, that He might overcome
evil by His own proper strength, which no
man could or ever can do, and that thus He
might become Justice, He willed to be born as
another man. Otherwise there was no need
that He should be born ; for He might have
assumed the human essence without birth,
as formerly He had occasionally done when
He appeared to the Most Ancient Church, and
likewise to the Prophets." This was by
filling an angel with His Divine, or taking
on His own in the angel, and thus the angelic
form, in which He could manifest Himself
and through which He could speak. But
redemption involved a combat with evil
and necessitated the assumption of the or-
ganic human forms of the external man in
which it inhered. Therefore, " in order that
He might put on evil, to fight against it and
to conquer it and that He might thus at the
same time join together in Himself the
Divine essence and the human essence, He
came into the world." * " The battle of the
Omnipotent God was with the hells, upon
which battle He could not have entered un-
less He had before put on the human. But

•Arcana Coelestia, n. 1573.

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 149

it must be known that the battle of the Lord
with the hells was not an oral battle as be-
tween reasoners and wranglers : such a battle
effects nothing at all there. But it was a
spiritual battle, which is of Divine truth
from Divine good, which was the very vital
principle of the Lord ; the influx of this
though the medium of sight, no one in hell
can resist. There is in it such power that
the infernal genii flee away at the mere per-
ception of it, cast themselves down into the
deep, and creep into caverns that they may
hide themselves.' 1 * Because there was no
longer an ultimate love of the Divine good
and truth of the Word with men; that is a
love and will of obedience to its command-
ments such as to serve as a medium of Divine
enlightenment and power, the Lord himself
took on the natural human, lived the "Word
into it, made it the Divine truth in ultimates,
and the medium of Divine power to men.

What the Lord did by the power of the
Divine truth in His human, He continues to
do through the Word, and gives man by the
power of the Word to do in His name, —
drive evil spirits back to hell, reject evils
from himself, both hereditary and acquired, to

* True Christian Religion, n. 124.

150 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

those who have confirmed themselves in the
appropriation of them. The rejection of
evils by a denial of them in the thought, is no
rejection nor removal of them ; but the ac-
knowledgment that they are from hell and
the repudiation of them as belonging to evil
spirits, is both a rejection and removal of
them, for then the Lord's redeeming power
operates by the Word to remove the evil
spirits and thus the source and inspiration of
the evils. This is Christianity; and known
and embraced in the will, and practiced in
the day's life, faithfully to the end, it is a
Christian Science indeed, omnipotent for
eternal life, and for the organic removal of
disorder by successive processes of actual life,
and the promotion of health in natural life
also. The formula of its practice is laid
down by Swedenborg as follows in the
Doctrine of Life :

I. All religion has relation to the life, and

the life of religion is to do good.
II. No one can do good, which is good,

from himself.
III. So far as a man shuns evils as sins he

does good, not from himself, but from

the Lord.

1. If a man wills and does good before he

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 151

shuns evils as sins, the good that he
wills and does is not good.

2. If a man thinks pious thoughts and

speaks pious words, and does not shun
evils as sins, the pious things which he
thinks and speaks are not pious.

3. If a man knows, and is wise in many

things, and does not shun evils as sins,

yet he is not wise.
IV. So far as any one shuns evils as sins,

he loves truths.
V. So far as any one shuns evils as sins he

has faith, and is spiritual.
VI. The decalogue teaches what evils are

sins.

VII. Murders, adulteries, thefts, and false

witness, of every kind, with the lust
after them, are evils which are to be
shunned as sins.

VIII. So far as any one shuns murders, of

every kind, as sins, he has love to-
wards the neighbor.

IX. So far as any one shuns adulteries of
every kind as sins, he loves chastity.
X- So far as any one shuns thefts of every
kind as sins, he loves sincerity.

XI. So far as any one shuns false witness
of every kind as sin, he loves truth.

152 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

XII. No one can shun evils as sins, so as in-
wardly to hold them in aversion, ex-
cept by combats against them.

XIII. Man ought to shun evils as sins, and

fight against them, as from himself.

XIV. If a man shuns evils for any other rea-

son than because they are sins, he
does not shun them, but only prevents
their appearing before the eyes of the
world.

It seems unnecessary to enter further into
the Doctor's affirmations and denials. When
he proceeds to speak of "Disease and Its
Cure," he speaks much more in harmony with
the teachings of Swedenborg than with the
idealism of his preceding pages. He says
the cause and cure of disease are always spir-
itual, and operate by Correspondence.

"The cause and cure of disease are always mental. The
apparent external causes of disease are emblems or correspond-
ences of the real interior and spiritual causes. When the
external is applied, it is really the internal which acts. Ipecac
does not produce vomiting because men think it does, or be-
cause it has any vital property whatever, but because it corre-
sponds to the sphere of disgust, loathing and rejection, which
is spiritual vomiting." — Page 38..

He might have said that the "sphere of
disgust, loathing and rejection " is its vital
property by Correspondence. As was shown
in the general doctrine, all poisonous things

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 153

in nature are produced from corresponding
principles in the hells. When ipecac, there-
fore, is introduced into the human system, the
evil spirits who are in that principle to which
it corresponds, communicate their sphere to
mind in connection with the body and oper-
ate upon both mind and body.

"An evil sphere is a concrete atmosphere of falsities, as
real as our terrestrial atmosphere, emanating from souls or
spirits who are in evil conditions. A similar sphere emanates
from every one of us, so far as we are in evil, and the whole
race would be simultaneously plunged into sickness, insanity
and death, if angels and good spirits were not adjoined to us,
whose spheres of goodness and truth counteract the evil
spheres, and hold us in the equilibrium of health and ration-
ality."— Page 40.

The Doctor might have added that the
angels and good spirits, inflowing into corre-
sponding things in nature, operate by what
we call natural laws, atmospheres, substances
and forces external to the body, to keep in-
tact this equilibrium of health, and to restore
it when disturbed. The efficient causes are
all spiritual, both for good and evil; but
they operate both directly and indirectly,
upon the mind and through corresponding
things in nature ; and thus through the mind
into the body, and into nature and by reac-
tion upon the body. As heaven conspires
through the angels attendant upon man to

154 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

keep the will in equilibrium, so all heaven
conspires in and through its corresponding
ultimates in nature to keep the body in equi-
librium and health.

"Disease is a disturbance of that equilibrium, and all its
phenomena are strictly representative of spiritual states and
their variations. Germs, microbes, bacteria, etc. , are always
in the first place the products or effects of disease, the repre-
sentative forms of the evil spheres. Being once produced,
they may become carriers of the sphere and evoke it again
into action in those persons in whom it is latent. Where the
spheres are not latent, the earners will be absolutely innocu-
ous." — Page 40.

The truth here is, that all disease-produc-
ing conditions originate in the spiritual
world. Their cause is in hell ; their active
centres are evil spirits and societies; their
corresponding forms in nature have no power
to produce disease, only they are planes of
influx for the producing spirits. When
these natural correspondents of evils are in-
troduced into the body, evil spirits infest
these substances and operate upon the body
to disorder its functions; and at the same
time they communicate their sphere to the
mind, and exciting its corresponding evil
forms, whether hereditary or acquired, occa-
sion mental disorders which again carry
themselves down into the corresponding
bodily organs and their functions. This is

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 155

what the Doctor means, or should mean, in
the saying that where the evil "spheres are
not latent the carriers will be absolutely in-
nocuous." The u evil spheres " can enter
into perverted and disordered mental forms;
and these by heredity belong to all, until
they are by real regeneration corrected and
re-formed. Of course those who are in ac-
tual sin are more susceptible to the sphere
of evil spirts, and consequently to the dis-
eases they induce through infectious germs
and such like, which the Doctor happily
calls " carriers of their sphere." But not al-
ways the evil suffer most from such causes,
for they by their evil selfhood may for the
time be more alert and observant of those
ultimate laws of bodily order, which are the
correspondents of heavenly order, and thus
receive into their natural life that "common
influx" which preserves their external in
health and beauty. The main point here,
however, is that diseases are in all cases
caused by the operation of evil spirits, and
that their operation is in and by means of
spiritual conditions either of the mind's life
or induced upon it. As Dr. Wilkinson says :
" Wherever a swamp and putridity of circum-
stance lies, they are congenially attracted, and

156 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

godly and godless folks are smitten if they
dwell upon that region."

This is an answer, also, to the question,
"Why are good people sick?" Dr. Hol-
combe says "the evil elements in so-called
good people are only suppressed, not eradi-
cated, and are ready to burst into activity as
soon as the conditions are supplied ; " and he
names as one of the conditions, "false think-
ing." It is true even that with regenerating
people, who look to the Lord alone and seek
to shun evils as sins in their daily life, the
great mass of their hereditary evils with
their fears, lusts and cravings, hide behind
their ignorances and fallacies and can only
be dislodged by the truth, seen and asserted
in the Lord's name. Few have the requisite
knowledge of truth concerning themselves,
and their relations to the Lord, and to the
hells, and few could stand the test of fidelity
to the naked truth upon these subjects, which
could alone uncover and subdue the varieties
of hereditary evil which lurk under our com-
mon notions and practices. Latent there, or
in unjudged activity, each lust and craving
"married to its own proper stupidity and im-
prudence, and embodied in life -long habits,"
these constitute a body of weakness, ignor-

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 157

ance and disorder, into which the infernal
spirits operate to "take away man's vital
happiness, make his sleep sordid, and enter-
ing by intimate correspondence into his or-
gans, debase their lives, and make their func-
tions vicious and disorderly."

This is also an explanation of the effects
of our anxieties, f ears, and unbelieving nutter
and fuss over unresisting and impressionable
children. We surround them with a sphere
of distrust and foreboding that invites and
attracts the evil spirits who love to iuduce
what we anticipate, and are thus able to pos-
sess their mortal brains and bodies. We
therefore take them out of the care of their
angelic guardians, and immerse them in evil
spheres. This explains also why a calm, con-
fident, trustful ministry from physician or
nurse will restore the spiritual eqnilibrium,
with manifest effects in the condition of the
body and the equilibrium of its functions.
It explains also the Doctor's assertion which
presumably all will admit.

" Imagination, hope, expectations, magnetism, faith,
mind, spontaneous recovery, have always been the most
potent factors in every cure made by the medical profession,
no matter what was the school or the theory of cure. The
doctor's highest power is personal, social, magnetic, spirit-
ual, not medicinal."

158

THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

In turning now to examine some of Dr.
Holcoinbe's suggestions in regard to the
cure of disease, and to turn the light of the
doctrine of Correspondence upon the whole
problem, two quotations are offered as em-
bodying such plain good sense, as to consti-
tute a canon of criticism. The first is from
an able article on " Psychopathy " by R. N.
Foster, M. D.

" In all departments of organized being, conscious or
unconscious alike, there is operative a constant connatus
toward a harmonious state of being, a connatus, which in-
cessantly and spontaneously, or voluntarily and intellectu-
ally, as the case may require, acts to supply all want, to
ward off all danger and to repair all injuries."— Mind in
Nature, Vol. 1, p 50.

This endeavor and effort in nature and in
spirit is the influx and operation of the Di-
vine love and wisdom in and according to the
correspondence of all things with the Lord,
and their harmony with each other ; conspiring
to universal order, and restraining and gov-
erning all disorder by corresponding oppo-
sites. The second quotation is in distinct
acknowledgment of this Divine source and
spiritual cause of all health and healing by
the means of both mental and physical, and
of both ordinary and unusual conditions. It

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 159

is from the pen of the Rev. John Worcester,
in the New Jerusalem Magazine for 1883,
in ah article full of valuable suggestions on
"the use of poisonous drugs," and reads as
follows :

"All healing power is from the Lord, just
as much now as when He was visibly present,
and just as much when medicines are used,
as when He employed only the simple means
of His touch. In a sense all healing is
miraculous, because it is from the influence
of the spiritual world into the natural, in the
sense in which Swedenborg says : 'The
things which appear in the three kingdoms
of nature are produced by an influx from
the spiritual into the natural world, and,
considered in themselves are miracles,
although on account of their familiar aspect
and their annual recurrence, they do not
appear as such.' Cures appear more mir-
aculous when they depend merely upon
changes of mental state, than when a medi-
cine also is employed. But in reality one
is just as miraculous as the other. The
healing life in both cases is the Lord's life ;
and in both it is increased and preserved by
the acknowledgment that it is HisP (1883,
p. 155.)

160 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

Keeping these two truths in mind, it. is
not only easy to see why, as the Doctor ad-
mits, all systems of cure " have done service
to humanity," and that " they will continue
to do so until the Lord comes," but also that
He comes in and by means of them accord-
ing to the laws of Divine order, which turn
even evils to use and over-rule all disorder
for good.

" Man as he lies stretched upon his pallet,
is still both a soul and a body and he is
subject to the influence of spiritual forces
operating by correspondence into the dis-
tinct planes of the soul and of the body, to
restore the equilibrium of the one and of the
other, and of one to the other. The fact that
diseases are spiritual in their origin, and that
the efficient cause of cure is in the spiritual
world, "is no hindrance to a man's being
healed naturally, for the Divine Providence
concurs with such means of healing/'* In
the process of repairing injury or maintain-
ing the status of health, the means em-
ployed are varied according to the nature of
the injury or the special demand of the con-
dition given ; and with these means spiritual
forces concur in such wise as to adapt them-

Arcana Coelestia. n. 5713.

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 161

selves to the varying correspondence. " The
brutes,' 1 says Dr. Wilkinson, " know better
than to resign themselves to doing nothing
under natural afflictions ; they lick their
sores, and seek their herbs ; and the domes-
tic animals bring their sorrows of this kind
to man, and assume a kind of patience under
the treatment he enjoins. We therefore
reckon that any medical practice which has
had a few precedents to correct it, is better
than that profession of nothing, to which
some of our brethren have directed their
hopes. It is equally true that many cases
would have recovered better by simply
watching, and the application of a few ob-
vious means mostly suggested by the patient's
feelings, than where a large apparatus of
drugs has been employed." Nevertheless,
drugs, as well as the simpler alleviating
means, have their use ; and one of the uses
assigned to them by Swedenborg is, "that
they conduce to absorbing malignities, thus
also to cures" * This is the key to the theory
of cure which probably led the Doctor to.
write the following:

" Drugs act as representatives of spiritual ideas, curing
by laws entirely unknown to the physician, while he is con-
gratulating himself that he is bringing about a cure accord-

* Divine Love and Wisdom, n. 33G.

162 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

ing to his own hypotheses, which are generally the merest
blunders in naturalism."

" The allopathic practice casts out devils or evils, by
Beelzebub, the prince of devils. ' Resist the devil and he
will flee from you.' The homeopathic practice — ■ like to
like' — is the true emblem-cure— the cure by correspond-
ences—' Resist not evil.' Whoever understands this script-
ure paradox can see how both Allopathy and Homeopathy
have their uses." — Page 38.

A paradox indeed the above must appear
standing as it does unexplained ; and it may-
be doubted whether there is not a fallacy
lurking in this form of statement. But to
those who have grasped the general doctrine
of Correspondence the fundamental idea may
be easily explained, and will throw some light
upon the fact that Divine Providence does
concur with both Allopathic and Homeopa-
thic treatment, while yet all efficient causes
of disease and cure are wholly spiritual.

Recall these truths : that all things in the
three kingdoms of nature which are poison-
ous and hurtful to man are produced from
hell ; that like things are in the hells and
flow forth by correspondence from the
evils of those there ; that evil spirits have
thus by correspondence not only conjunction
with such things in nature, but that their
evils animate them and give to them their
essential properties. Recall further, that all

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 163

disease is produced by influx from the hells,
either through man's active evils into his
body, or into conditions therein existing
from hereditary or imparted disorder; that
certain drugs introduced into the human sys-
tem do produce morbid states similar in
theii symptoms with those of disease, be-
cause evil spirits corresponding to^them have
in them a plane of influx through which
they can operate.

Then it follows, that given any state of
disease which is a correspondent and plane
of influx for certain evil spirits, the introduc-
tion of a drug which carries with it opposite
symptoms furnishes a plane of influx for
spirits of an opposite nature ; and in their
conflict and opposition, equilibrium is re-
stored. This is what the Doctor calls cast-
ing out evils by Beelzebub ; and is described
by Swedenborg as a common phenomenon of
the hells, and a fundamental principle of
government there.

If, on the other hand, in any given set of
symptoms a drug be introduced which carries
with it similar symptoms, it furnishes in the
bodily organism a lower plane of influx for
like spirits ; and by the law of the life of
the evil that they are congenially attracted

164 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

and gravitate into their lowest corresponding
ultimate, the drug " absorbs their maligni-
ties," and the system gathering up its forces
by the law of resistance to disturbance re-
jects both drug and infestors. The Doctor
might, however, have found a more pointed
Scriptural illustration of this process, in the
case of the demons obliged to leave the man,
begging to be allowed to enter into the
swine. Influx from heaven into correspond-
ing functions of the body produces a resisting
sphere even in sickness, and operates as a
mandate upon infesting spirits as soon as a
lower form to which they correspond is pre-
sented to them; for that they shall animate it
when presented is the law of their life, The
smaller the quantity of the drug, and the
finer its state of subdivision the less resist-
ance it offers to the connatus of living forces
for its expulsion, after " malignities are ab-
sorbed."

This explanation is purely inferential;
though it has long been accepted by many
students of Swedenborg as a sufficient, or at
least suggestive, answer to the question, How
is, it if all causes belong to the spiritual
world that drugs do facilitate the removal of
disease ? When the science of Correspond-

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 165

ence is better understood, this matter will
become clearer ; and we may hope that a
" science of medicine " will take the place of
empiricism. In the meantime the suggestion
may stand as an attempted explanation of
the fact that " Divine Providence concurs "
with the use of: herbs and simples to the
cure of man's immediate distresses.

And what of mental states, imagination,
hope, expectation, faith, and the direct pro-
duction of such states by the influence of
mind upon mind, which has been the phy-
sician's stronghold in all time, and in all
schools of practice ? " The Doctor's highest
power is personal, social, magnetic, spiritual,
not medicinal." Are there possibilities of
useful development in this power ? Dr. Hol-
combe defines three forms of this influence.

" It is Mind-Cure when one person of strong will and
magnetic power, operates by thought-transference from a
positive standpoint, upon the mind and nervous system of a
patient made negative by sickness, fear, ignorance or debil-
ity. By a species of mental induction, he produces a new
state of thought, which through the correlation of the
nervons system brings about a condition of health. It
is a species of mesmerism." — Page 43.

This is what we are all the time doing,
one for another, or one against the other, —
namely, producing "by a species of mental
induction a new state of thought," thus call-

166 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

ing forth new states of the will and its af-
fections, and an altered flow and endeavor
of all the human forces. "The human world is
full of powers in a state of balance and in-
difference; change the posture of anything
therein and the whole has to re-adjust itself
to a new balance, — a rush of forces takes
place, and currents pass to and fro until the
equilibrium is recovered." " The moral and
physical are both under this statical law."
Hourly and momentarily, by touch, by sphere,
by speech, by simple thought, human beings
are thus affecting and moving one another,
consciously, or unconsciously, for good or ill.
The power of one will and mind over an-
other, by the use of thoughts manifested in
words, looks or acts, directed to the judg-
ment and understanding, or to the feelings
of fear, ambition or hope, is the common
fact of all social contact. Why should it not
be exerted then for the useful ends of heal-
ing ? " If ever it has been good to be under
a course of murcury " asks Dr. Wilkinson,
" shall it not be better still to be under a
course of humanity? 7 ' The sphere of a
sound, believing, use-loving person directed
to the mind of a sick, ignorant, fearful, dis-
couraged one, is simply a direct application

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 167

of human forces, changing the states of the
mind, the whole adjustment of spheres, and
thus the influx and movement of forces ac-
cording to the correspondence of mind and
body. Every good man is required by the
" law of love,' 1 to carry about with him a
sphere of trust, courage, and determination to
all things orderly and useful; and to will his
good- will toward men " not only in gen-
eral but in particular, and with regard to the
individual states of those to whom he can be
useful so far as he can know them. Why
should not this power of mind over mind,
which belongs to the obligations of neigh-
borly love, be studied and practiced on the
same grounds, that make any of the more
remote and indirect means of alleviating
physical suffering allowable?

Mesmerism, as the control of the will of
the patient, voluntarily yielded or compelled,
is indeed capable of abuse in many ways.
Ill-disposed persons may use it to acquire an
influence for bad ends. It may be abused
by patients by being resorted to as a kind
of opiate to compensate for want of moral
determination. But these possible abuses are
not reasons against its use as a curative
agent by suitable persons in indicated cases,

168 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

any more than the possible abuse of opiates
and stimulants preclude their use. The
danger should be clearly understood, and all
" must know that there is no patent outward
means that can be a substitute for sanity of
will; that sooner or later they must exert
themselves, and waken from their delusions,
and that every dose of their mesmeric opium
over and above what was required, is a
vehicle of weakness which will cost them a
fresh struggle to conquer, whenever the time
when they must arise shall come." The nor-
mal exercise of mind upon mind, of the
healthy will and thought upon the morbid,
but still consciously responsive will and in-
tellect of the patient, is not open to the same
dangers, nor need it therefore be so strictly
confined to professional practitioners.

It may be said in general, that the more
immediately spiritual the means used for
relieving abnormal conditions, the more di-
rectly they are exerted upon the mind of the
patient, the greater the possibilities of in-
jury to the mind while relieving the body.
Errors may be impressed, superstitions con-
firmed, false persuasions and insanities in-
duced and fixed, by the very manifold pro-
cesses of mental induction which through

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 169

change of spheres and alteration of the flow
of human forces into the body enables it to
recover its equilibrium of function. But dis-
eases are constantly being induced in the
same way through the unconscious influence
of one mind upon another, and its appeal to
selfish affections and their congenial stu-
pidities and errors and falsities. The pres-
ence of such mental powers and the fact of
their unconscious transference, simply calls
for a science of mind-cure and a conscious
and intelligent application of the same
powers to the healing of the sick.

This science of mind-cure so far as it is
attained at all, will be obliged to light its
lamp with the doctrine of Correspondences ;
because it reveals the law of the relation of
states of mind to their symptomatic mani-
festations in the mind and in the body; and
because it involves also those Laws of
Order, which are the laws of Divine Provi-
dence, and reveal what by the will of God
and in the nature of truth and goodness
man may do for fellow-man, and what must
be left for man to do for himself in freedom
according to reason.

One thing a man cannot do for his fellow-
man is to regenerate him ; he can only lead

170 THE SCIENCE OP CORRESPONDENCE.

him by instruction to co-operate by his own
will and endeavor with the laws of regener-
ation ; one man cannot repent of sin for an-
other ; he can only help him to see the sin in
the light of its consequences, and the Lord's
will with respect to it. But one may sur-
round another with a sphere of intelligent
desire for his repentance, reformation and
regeneration, while leading him in freedom ;
one may exert such powers of will and
of thought upon another as will counteract
his bondage to disorderly conditions, his
ignorance or fantasy, and restore him to
freedom to exert his will and think sanely;
much more then, surely, may one by the
sum of his influence exerted upon the im-
agination, hopes, intelligence and ambitions
of the sick person, labor to induce a "sound
mind in a sound body," which is itself the
very fundamental condition of that freedom
and rationality which is the primary object
of divine care. The great obstacles to prog-
ress m this humane work are ignorance of
the nature and laws of the mind on all
hands ; and, on the part of many well-mean-
ing aspirants to mind-cure, ignorance of the
body and its laws ; while on the part of pro-
fessional physicians, whose knowledge of

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 171

the human organism should specially qual-
ify them and inspire them for this study,
there is the bondage of tradition and weight
of materialism. One thing may be affirmed,
namely : That those who aspire to the study
of mind and its correspondence with the
body, must be students also of the bodily or-
ganism ; and those who would practice from a
love of use to men, the art of mental healing,
should approach it through a study of mind
and body, and add to the most complete
physiology attainable the psychology revealed
for the New Jerusalem. Approached by
such avenues of preparation it will probably
be found that most pathological conditions,
and even physical changes of structure, "are
only organic insanities or spells which only
require the right word of the physician to
dissipate them ; and that, although if they
went on they would kill by their virulence,
yet are they amenable by a simple impression
from without," that is, from an outside per
sonality as the centre of a re-adjustment of
spheres. Meanwhile, " next to the self con-
trol of the patient, which is the top of mortal
medicines, we may reckon the mental control
oi the doctor, who makes use of his own

m THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

health and knowledge to give faith in the
moments when it can be received."

The so-called " faith-cure" demands treat-
ment as distinct from "mind-cure." In this,
prayer is the agency by which a new sphere
is created, and this sphere is often strength-
ened by a cordon of prayers. Dr. Holcombe
says of it :

"Faith-Cure is ©fleeted by an exalted state of the mind, in
which hope, expectation and imagination are the chief factors.
That it is a mental cure and not a truth cure, or a Divine cure,
is evident from the fact, that cures of this'description have
been made in all ages and countries and among devotees of
every and any religion. The cures are sometimes very extra-
ordinary." — Page 43.

If the healing of the body can be brought
about through the states of the mind, prayer
as one of the means which powerfully eifect
the states of mind, must be regarded as a
means for accomplishing such result. As
practiced by the u faith-healers " it is usually
grounded in an utterly false and pernicious
notion of the use of prayer, and induces
states of enthusiastic persuasion which invite
insane and deceiving spirits, whose sphere, if
it dislodge the evil spirits flowing into the
diseased parts, induces a far more serious
disease of the mind. The notion is that the
Lord has promised to answer the prayer of
faith, and that if we are only firmly per-

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 173

suaded that He will do a certain thing, He is
pledged to do it. Accordingly, all arts are
nsed to induce this confidence in the patient
and in all present, creating thus a consensus of
spheres, and a powerful persuasion that the
Lord will presently answer. Such a set of
conditions connot fail to invite enthusiastic
spirits, and they, by the very delight of their
life, inject insanities, pervert the truths of the
Word, and perform magical miracles with
them. There are spirits in the other life
who by the knowledge of truths, and by
the power of truths in the ultimates of the
Word, induce changes of state in others, lift-
ing them into enthusiastic imaginations,
bringing them into new relations, and subject-
ing them to their power for infernal ends.
The faith that they induce is a mere persua-
sion, and the truths of the Word which they
recall are merely for confirmation of falsities
and the securing to themselves power over
the spirits of men thereby. An intrepretation
of the Lord's words, "whatsoever ye ask in
prayer, believing ye shall receive," as mean-
ing that He will give whatever we have un-
doubting confidence in asking, and that He
will directly interpose to heal those who ask
Him in humility and confidence, and prove

174 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

their confidence by persistent importunity,
is a direct invitation to such spirits. Heal-
ing of the body may follow, at least a change
of its state which passes for healing; but the
mind is held in the power of such spirits and
the blind lead the blind, till the last case is
worse than the first. The chemical labora-
tory is rather to be preferred, than such faith
and prayer.

But there is a true faith directed to the
Lord Jesus Christ as the God of heaven
and earth, which is an internal acknowledg-
ment that His will is good -will to men; that
He operates His will according to the laws
of Divine order revealed in His Word and
its doctrine; that the divine order of His
goverment conspires to health and usefulness,
and the removal of all obstructions to these
consistent with man's spiritual welfare. It
is in harmony with this faith to feel that
health is a good thing which the Lord has
abundantly showed His will and power to
give, with the prayer that we may come into
a state to receive it. Such faith causes the
Lord to be present, and when there is in it
the love of Him and of having His will done,
the love conjoins. Such acknowledgment of
faith, and prayer to the Lord in such faith,

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 175

moves heaven and disposes the soul, and
affects the world of spirits, and increases the
power of all orderly means of healing, both
mental and physical.

It comes to this then in regard to faith
and the prayer of faith as agents in healing,
that there is a true and spurious faith and
a right and wrong kind of prayer; that so
far forth as inducing states of mind and
thence of body are concerned, either may
contribute to the effect of relief from bodily
ills, and the spurious sometimes more quickly
and manifestly than the true; but that heal-
ing secured by a false faith and selfish prayer
is at the expense of a spiritual bondage
which is worse than sickness. But this is a
warning and appeal in behalf of a true faith
and a right prayer as against what is false
and wrong, not against the place and value
of such means in the healing of the
sick. In general it may be said, that a true
faith always involves the acknowledgment
that the Lord's ends are eternal, and that we
do not know what temporary states and cir-
cumstances may be best for us; and the
spirit of its prayer, whatever the petition,
is always "not my will but thine be done, 1 '

176 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

In this spirit and acknowledgment, prayer
for health and restoration to active usefulness
may be offered for one's self, or for others ;
and it is impossible to overestimate its pos-
sible effect. It is an active agent in a spirit-
ual world where space is an appearance,
where thought brings presence, where love
conjoins, and good -will is felt. Directed to
the Lord Jesus Christ, as the visible God in
whom is the invisible, it penetrates heaven;
carrying the case of another in love and
thought to Him, it brings that other into the
sphere of faith in which it is offered ; it affects
all in the spiritual world within this circle of
personality — the spirits about us and about
the person who is the subject of our desire
and thought. Swedenborg tells us that
"supplication, although tacit, with those who
supplicate from the heart, is heard as a cry
in heaven. This is the case when such only
think, much more when they groan from a
sincere heart." Think, then, of all the influ-
ences of good- will, enlightenment, power and
healing, waiting in heaven to now down
through the world of spirits to man, by every
way that opens. The source is inexhaus-
tible. The impulse is continually towards
us. The flow is measured only by the truth,

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 177

the sincerity, the spirituality of man's desire.
Into that fountain of influences true prayer
ascends as a cry. It is heard as such, felt as
such, responded to as such. We do not
know how many ways of influx it may open,
nor how powerfully they may affect all our
spiritual associates, including those who are
present in our desire and thought. We only
know that if offered in acknowledgment and
submission to the Divine will it is in har-
mony with Divine order ; and that the re-
vealed laws of spiritual association and influx
are manifold, including ourselves and all
whom we can pray for; and that the move-
ments of these laws are exact, and the at-
mosphere in which they operate is more quick
and alive than that electric fluid, which,
every time you make connection by the
faintest impulse at any point, reports the tick
at every station in a circuit of a thousand
miles.

The question, therefore, is not as to the
influence of mind upon the body, nor of the
effect of one mind upon another as a means of
reaching and affecting bodily disease, nor as
to the efficacy of prayer as a means in this
change and re-adjustment of mental and thus
of bodily states ; but only as to the orderly use

178 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

of these means, which, we affirm, can only be
learned in its fullness from the laws of Corre-
spondence and the principles of theology now
opened to the church from the Word, and by
means of ''things heard and seen" by the serv-
ant of the Lord chosen and prepared for
this very purpose. We turn now to consider,
finally, in the light of these revelations the
claims of Christian Science as set forth by
Dr. Holcombe:

"The Christian Science cure is not an answer to the prayer of
faith, nor is it only the operation of mind upon mind. It is the
operation of absolute or divine truth upon the individual mind.
It recognizes truth as a spiritual force to be called into activ-
ity, as any other latent force is evoked, by suitable conditions.
It is based upon the idealistic interpretation of nature and
the omnipresence and immanence of the divine life. Its mot-
to is, God is the only life; Spirit is the only substance; Love
working by Truth is the only law." — Page 43.

There is something attractive in this form of
statement to a disciple of Swedenborg who
only thinks in general ideas; for being accus-
tomed to the thought of the supremacy of the
spiritual over the natural, and of the Lord as
the only life, and of His goodness and truth
as the verimost substance and form, such a
statement seems to be in general agreement
with the truth. But the agreement disappears
when it is analyzed as to the particulars in-
volved.

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 179

What is this "absolute divine truth" which
operates upon the individual mind? Is it
the truth which God is, — the "Word, which is
God? Then Swedenborg affirms and shows
that it does not operate upon any individual
without a medium. "It is a law of Divine
Providence that man should be led and taught
by the Lord from heaven through the Word
and doctrine and preaching from it, and this
in all appearance as by himself."* The Word
is such a medium of divine truth to man and of
its power with him, because it is written in Cor-
respondences, and while man reads it in its
letter the angels of heaven perceive the spirit-
ual sense of what is read, and man is thus
brought according to his willingness to be in-
structed and led by the Lord within the sphere
of divine truth as it is with the angels of heaven.

But the Lord thus leads him by correspond-
ence and influx "according to the truths that
are with him, and does not immediately infuse
new ones/'

What, then, is meant by " the absolute
truth ?" If it be said the truth of the Word
is meant, and the Doctor at least does prob-
ably mean this, then it is answered that
according to Swedenborg the truth of the

♦Divine Providence, n. 154.

180 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

Word is not absolute truth but accommodated
truth. It is in the letter accommodated to all
sorts and conditions of men, and " is not un-
derstood without doctrine in the spiritual
sense truth is accommodated to the angels
of heaven, and to the apprehension of in-
structed and spiritually minded men. But
even to the angels truth is clothed in appear-
ances, and is absolute only with God.

If it be said that " absolute " is not used in
this technical sense, but only as equivalent to
genuine truth and as distinguished from
falsity and sensuous fallacy, then we have
to inquire whether or not Christian Science
has any knowledge of genuine truths. The
fact that "people have been cured of long-
standing diseases which have resisted all
forms of medication " counts for nothing in
this inquiry ; for any mental persuasion may
effect this, and, as we have said, a false per-
suasion may be more immediately effective
than the truth, because stronger in appeal
to hope and ambition. What are the truths
upon which Christian Science relies ?

"The omnipresence of G-od, his perpetual
immanence in the soul, the power of truth
and of faith, the force of ideas, the curative
efficacy of thought, the ubiquity of mind —

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 181

the silent transference of thought regardless
of time and space, the supremacy of the
spiritual over the natural, of the real over
the apparent; these are the factors of
Christian Science. Disprove them and it
perishes. It stands or falls with these eternal
verities."

The central inquiry here is as to the idea
of God. Swedenborg says "thought con-
cerning God as Man, in whom is the Divine
Trinity, opens heaven; on the other hand,
thought concerning God as not Man, which
is presented apparently as a cloud or as
nature in her smallest principles, closes
heaven; for God is Man as the universal
heaven in its complex is a man, and every
angel and spirit is thence a man. Therefore
it i*s that thoughts alone concerning the Lord
Jesus Christ, as being the God of the uni-
verse opens heaven.* There is one unvarying
teaching in Swedenborg's writings — "that
the idea of God in heaven is the Lord;"
that the only true idea possible to man is
that of a Divine Man; that the "idea of an
invisible God is no idea, and is not separa-
ble from the thought of the principles and
forces of nature, and cannot communicate

*4.thanasian Creed, n. 6.

182 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

with heaven and the Lord, but falls back
upon itself and perishes. Contrast with this
the teaching of any and every work on
Christian Science that you can find, and you
will see that its "absolute truth" concern-
ing God is just this which Swedenborg de-
clares to be no truth, and which he says
every naturalist and denier of God shows
himself in the spiritual world to have con-
firmed in his life on earth. The idea of
God with which Christian Science expects to
" renovate the spiritual character as surely
as it remodels the physical system," is the
thought of a universal Spirit, proceeding
from no Divine Person, and omnipresent by
virtue of its ideal presence as the central and
pervading life of all persons and all things.
All its reasonings play hide-and-seek
around two notions : God as the spirit in
man ; and man as the thought and manifes-
tation of God. This, then, measured by the
doctrine revealed for the use of those who
will be of the New Church, will not answer
as the absolute or genuine truth ; and in the
light of Swedenborg's revelations of the
future life, a man would refuse such medi-
cine at any price.

Other factors of Christian Science are

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 183

"the power of truth and of faith/ the force
of ideas, the curative efficacy of thought,
the ubiquity of mind." The power is not
denied ; but the power for good, that is per-
manent spiritual good, will depend upon the
quality of the faith, ideas, thought. Is it the
truth of the spiritual sense of the Word that
is to exercise this beneficent power? If so,
is it discerned by the Christian Scientist in-
terpreting the Scriptures by a few Corre-
spondences and many more preconceived
notions? Any one who knows anything
about it, will not mistake the fanciful specu-
lations that are offered as the spiritual sense
of the Word for the genuine truth. Sweden-
borg says that hereafter none will be per-
mitted, even by a knowledge of Correspond-
ences, to enter into the spiritual sense, except
they be principled in genuine doctrine, lest
it be profaned. Are these genuine doctrines
known to Christian Scientists? Dr. Hol-
combe will scarcely claim that they are ; and
it has been shown that a great many notions
to which he seems to lend his sanction are di-
rectly contrary to the genuine truths revealed
by the Lord through His servant, Swedenborg.

But granting that genuine truths are known
and acknowledged in their divine rational au-

184 THE SCIENCE OP CORRESPONDENCE.

thority, we have still to inquire whether the
principle on which Christian Science claims to
work with them is a valid one.

"Whoever can plant the absolute truth in the center of the
human soul has a lever which can move, unconsciously to the
individual, the will, the understanding, the imagination, the
sensations, the brain, the heart, the lungs, the blood; and can
determine the chemical or nutritive interchanges and metamor-
phoses of every molecule of the body.

Hence it is that divine truth renovates the spiritual character
as surely as it remodels the physical system. It works from
center to circumferences." — Page 47.

Can absolute or genuine truth, being known
be planted at the center of a human soul "un-
consciously to the individual?" Not by any
human being ; not at all in any other sense
than that it is present from the Lord in the
inmost — always and to eternity ; and in the
internal heavenly mind in the form of
"remains," waiting to be consciously ac-
cepted by the individual acting in freedom
according to the truths "of which his under-
standing is composed." The internal has no
power to come forth except as the individual
learns truths from the Word and consciously
and freely determines his life according to
them. If truth in the internal could work
these wonders that the Doctor enumerates,
the angels who are already associated with
men and touching these spiritual "remains,"

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 185

would work them for all men without help
from man. But, on the contrary, Swedenborg
shows throughout, and by every fact and rea-
son of Divine Providence, "that the Lord does
not without the use of means, teach man truths
either from himself, or through the angels;
but by means derived from the Word, from
preaching and reading, from conversation and
intercourse with others, and from private re-
flections arising out of them; and man is then
enlightened according to his affections ground-
ed in use, otherwise he would not act as if
from himself* The only way, therefore, in
whxh one can plant genuine truths in a hu-
man soul is by instruction and appeal to his
affection and the conscious determinations of
his own will and life. It is "to teach truth
and lead by truth to good/' not blindly, but
as one leads another through his understand-
ing.

Another fallacy in this principle of "truth-
cure" as it is called, is that divine truth
"works from center to circumferences." It
leads to the supposition that if implanted in
the center of the soul, or awakened there,
it will work from within out, secretly and even
"unconsciously" to the individual. The Doc-

♦Athanasian Creed, n. 67.

186 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

tor ought to know that the whole doctrine of
Correspondence and Influx is against this
notion. It is a law of divine order "that the
Lord acts from inmosts and from ultimates
at the same time, because only thus are all
things held together in connection." It is
shown by Swedenborg throughout that the
operation of divine and spiritual forces is
simultaneously from centre and circumference
to order intermediates; not therefore by vir-
tue of interior will and thought without out-
ward obedience, much less by influx without
instruction in truths, is man healed as to his
spiritual character. Any secret influence ex-
erted "unconsciously to the individual" if it
were allowed, would only be an obsession of
his will, which no angel would attempt,
which evil spirits dare not, and which men
ought not to practice.

A true Christian Science will assert the
cause of all disease as spiritual; but it will
not ignore its organic and functional effects
in the disordered forms it induces in the
spirit first, and thence by correspondence in
the body. It will rightly refer the root and
origin of all that afflicts man in mind, body
or estate, to man's evil will and way; but it
will not ignore its actual reality and infernal

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 187

contagion until arrested and removed by re-
pentance and regeneration, involving man's
final judgment and promotion to his own
place and perfect environment in a spiritual
world made and governed to that end. It
will rightly assert the omnipotence of the Re-
deemer over all manner of sin and sickness ;
but it will not ignore the laws of divine Provi-
dence by which the Great Physician ever
works through man's free will and co-oper-
ation, and this by organic processes and for
eternal ends *

The one legitimate end and effort for man
is to come into divine order, by an observance
of all revealed laws, spiritual and natural.
The possibility and the obligations of such a
life of order are greatly increased by the re-
velations of the laws of Divine Providence
and of the spiritual world, and of man's
nature and relation to that world. As these
revelations are studied and understood we
may expect the doctrine of regeneration to
shed its light upon the intercourse between
the soul and the body, and to inaugurate for
men a science of health and healing. The
science of Correspondence, which Sweden-
borg calls "the science of sciences," when

♦The New Birth, p. 122.

188 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

studied in the acknowledgment of the doc
trines of spiritual life and in connection with
physiology will prove to be the " key " to
a new medicine as it is the lamp of a new
life. It has been my hope to win some
minds to the study of this better way, and to
steady some who are already trying to walk
in it, and who are sometimes deceived by
side lights which are only the ignis fatui
of naturalism, miscalled idealism.

While the principles of a true Christian
Science of mental and bodily health are being
studied from the facts and doctrines of the
revelation made through Swedenborg, they
will not go far astray who remember religion
is of life, and that our chief concern is to live
the principles of true religion as revealed in
the "Word and its doctrine, trusting the Lord
as our Heavenly Father, who will lead us and
teach us, and as an Almighty Redeemer who,
if we (t continue in His Word," will deliver
us by His truth. When man will thus look
to the Lord and do what He teaches, living
in the reality and power of spiritual things ;
concerned only that evils should be brought
to light that they may be repented of and
put away, trusting the Lord to overrule all
things for good to them that love Him, then

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 189

all things will work together to bring his life
into order; one thing with another, and all
together with a view to the harmonious
whole in heaven, which is the divine end in
the making of us. The more simply and
trustfully any one is in this life, the more he
will regard disease as a disorder and a man-
ifestation of evils, and the more he will rise
above it y not by denying it, but by seeking
only to know and do the Lord's will, and to
come into obedience to the laws of spiritual
and bodily health, and the more he will en-
joy inward tranquillity and peace. They are
right, therefore, who assert the supremacy of
the spiritual life ; for so far as we come into
that orderly life of the spirit, which is regen-
eration, we are protected from the sphere of
evil spirits, brought within the sphere of an-
gelic association, and into the stream of that
divine influx and operation which worts all
things for eternal ends. This spiritual state
lifts from the body at once the chief cause of
its ills and makes way for happy usefulness
day by day in the circumstances which are
the best possible preparation for our entrance
into the soul's own world in its own body ; a
body which is fashioned in the image of the
soul's ruling love, and is free in a world

190 THE SCIENCE OF CORRESPONDENCE.

where to think is to see, where to wish is to
have, where to will and purpose is to be and
do. "To him that overcometh will I give to
eat of the tree of life which is in the mid?*
of the paradise of God!"

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